How to hire the marketing people you need

If you look at startup company LinkedIn networks over time, you'll see turnover in sales and marketing in the early years that looks insane. This is because hiring go to market roles is hard. You are going to get it wrong. More than once.

This article should improve your odds. :)

Why you'll get it wrong

• No go to market strategy →
• No scope for a role, which looks the same as too much scope for a role →
• No sense of the kind of person to look for →
• No clarity in job descriptions or in direction to recruiters →
• No standards by which to evaluate candidates that connect to your specific business

How to get better

1 Figure out what kind of business you are

What are you building? Why? For who? How will it make their lives better? What has to be true about them and their work for that to happen? Who or what are you competing against? How will you acquire users or customers? Is your business going to be low-cost-entry + bottoms-up + land-and-expand or is it open-source + community-driven + usage-growth + commercial-support or is it..?

The best marketing for one set of answers will be the worst marketing for another.

If you’re selling enterprise software into hospital groups that costs $250k a year at its cheapest and takes three months to pilot and get through HIPAA reviews with an additional three months to integrate and successfully onboard a customer with the help of sales engineering or professional services once they’ve signed a contract—you will have a very different marketing strategy (and tactics) compared to a freemium product selling into unregulated industries with initial buy-in for a paid tier of $100 a year with a 14-day free trial and self-onboarding guided by docs and in-app tutorials that takes on average less than 30 days.

The person who's great at one is going to be terrible at the other.

* People who do both do exist, but 1) they're rare and 2) you can't afford them [see 1].

2 Stack rank what you want from marketing

Do you want one person who will design, build, and maintain a static website using Github and Hugo and also create a logo and also figure out your growth strategy and also run email campaigns out of Mailchimp and also travel to events every month to give talks and also develop your messaging and also write your blog posts and also...?

This is not a thing. There are definitely people who will do all of this. Half of it will be terrible. Some of it will be decent. A little will be great. They're going to burn out. No one will be happy.

Most marketers who aren’t new to the field specialize in either the so-called “soft” or “hard” sides of marketing, focusing more on brand and communications or growth, analytics, and channel optimization. “Even CMO-level candidates typically tilt more heavily in one direction.” —Arielle Jackson

So decide which things are most important to do most well right now and in the near future: product marketing, growth, PR/comms, or brand. At an early stage or pre-growth startup, the answer is almost always product marketing or growth.

• Is growth of usage for your free tier more important than revenue?
• Is brand recognition more important than usage?
• Is getting into a magic quadrant more important than technical blog content?
• Is marketing technology and operations more important than any growth strategy?
• Is scaling the marketing organization and execution more important than figuring out what does and doesn't work?
• Is managing the board more important than functionally doing the job?

Be very explicit about which items on your list are absolutely necessary, which are highly desirable, and which are only nice-to-haves. Make sure everyone in the hiring process knows.

For a crash course in all the types of marketing at startups, read Marketing 101 for Technical Founders.

3 Accept that change will happen

The same product, team, and strategy that got you to Series A will not get you to Series C will not get you to an IPO. As the company grows and changes, your needs and priorities change. Often—especially in go to market—the people will also need to change.

This is ok! It's ok for you and it's ok for them. Discuss it openly and make a plan together.

4 Understand seniority and experience tradeoffs

Ideally, you want a person with some experience in your sector with your go to market at your stage of growth and the next one, who can effectively execute the top items in your ranked priorities.

It’s highly unlikely that such a person exists and that you can afford them and that they will work for you.

So, trade offs.

The more junior the role, the less experience and record-of-previous-work you will have to go on. Which means more weight has to be given to how fast they will climb the learning curve and whether they can be successful in your particular environment.

The more senior the role, the more experience and record you will have to go on. But also the more likely they will be to simply repeat what they did at their last jobs. So unless you're certain that's what you want, more weight has to be given to how they think about applying their skills to your specific business and whether they're even open to learning the details of your product, customer, and market.

Make sure everyone in the hiring process knows what you're looking for and where to place more or less weight.

5 Have some concept of a marketing ladder

Here’s a very basic ladder in a template that you can copy and modify for your company.

6 Write good job descriptions

A job description should have everything a candidate needs to self-select. Look at it the same way you do copy on your website or in ads or on the side of a bus. It’s part of your top of funnel and you want qualified leads who are good fits for the role and your team.

• What’s the job?
• What’s the essence of the company, product, and market?
• What value will the role deliver to the company?
• What value will the company deliver to the person in the role?
• What are the expectations and requirements?
• Which things are deal breakers and which aren’t?
• What kinds of people will be successful?
• Where is it located?

If your candidates are all wrong, the problem is with your job description, your choice of recruiters, or how you’ve trained recruiters. In other words, it’s your fault.

Some interviewing tips

No assignments

Everything should be doable within the context of an interview or interview time. If you need someone to spend many hours working on something, you don't know what you want. Go back to the top of this article.

Here are some practical in-interview tasks that will achieve anything you could with an assignment.

• Walk through some slides from your pitch deck and ask them to reverse engineer the messaging, personas, and GTM strategy
• Ask them to critique a product page on a competitors website
• Ask them what their favorite app or product is, then to draft a cold outbound email pitching it
• Ask them to lay out a social media plan for a new feature launch
• Ask them to sketch a product launch timeline
• Show them a funnel with volumes and conversion rates with a clear problem, then ask how they would go about debugging it

Interview by being interviewed

The more senior the role, the more likely it is that you are being interviewed and not the other way around. The kinds of questions the candidate asks and what they choose to dig into are strong indicators about how they approach the role and where their interests or expertise lie.

Here are some lines of inquiry to expect from senior roles.

• What business need are you serving with this hire?
• What do you want this role to accomplish in year one?
• What is the go to market strategy? How has it changed over time? Where are the gaps today?
• What does your funnel look like today? What do you want it to look like? The more detail they dig into the better.
• Who do you position against in your marketing? Who do you compete against in real life?
• What are metrics like lead volumes, sales cycles, ACVs, CAC
• What are your lead sources and channels? What have you learned so far?
• What is the sales motion, specifically, step by step?
• What’s the structure of the marketing team today?
• What’s the structure of the sales team today? How is that expected to change over the next year?
• What’s the runway? When are you going out to raise again? What do you need to show in order to raise and what’s the gap between today and that?
• What are the keys to success for this role?
• What are the risks, or what would cause someone to fail?

Things to consider for every hire

• How long will it take them to have an impact?
• Do they think about how their work intersects with other teams?
• Will they create structure or do they need to be provided structure? How much?
• How well can they communicate in different settings with different audiences?
• Are you willing to put in the work to make them successful?

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Good luck!