Scaling a marketing team in a BtoB start-up post series B

Article first published in January 2023 on Medium

A year ago I was looking back at my first year at GitGuardian, a cybersecurity start-up developing cybersecurity solutions and summarized some lessons learned from this experience. I have now completed the second year in the CMO role and I thought why not do it again? Scaling an organization is definitely a thrilling journey and time flies so fast doing it that you never really realize how much was accomplished until you take the time to stop and look.

A bit of context

GitGuardian now has 100 employees and the marketing grew in the same manner, we started 2022 with 8 team members and we are now 14. The ARR was multiplied by 2 and the marketing budget increased by 60%.

Our customer base has evolved a bit towards larger accounts and therefore longer funnel time. Multi-touch is more than ever our bread and butter.

In the meantime, the sales team and the product team also grew, consequently, the number of interactions and the need for alignment followed the same curve.

Team wise

We made it! The team almost doubled. We did not change the overall team structure, we still have:

• A growth/demand gen team
• A content team
• A product marketing team
• Support functions: design, web, data&ops

The major changes are:

1. Adding a mid-manager for the Growth Marketing team
2. Adding a full-time resource for Data&Ops
3. Internalising SEO
4. Doubling similar positions
5. Adding a full-time resource for field marketing
6. Having the first team members in different time zones

Here is the new organizational structure

Agencies are still used for Press Relations and for Analyst Relations. If you still wonder what to keep internally and what to externalize, here is an excellent article on the topic.

The objective of the year was also to double resources on similar roles while acquiring missing competencies. With this approach, you diminish your risk linked to turnover, you get rid of a lot of bottleneck issues and you improve the team’s expertise. And if you hire well you can build a great team of experts. As a manager, you have to learn to lead people who know more than you on their specific subject. Let go of “you know it all”, don’t worry, you are also becoming an expert in complex system management!

Tech Stack wise

No big changes there as we already had a solid ground to build on. We added small tooling to automate and gain efficiency. Zapier + N8N for most automation proves to be a very powerful stack that will have us scale through series B. However we are starting to invest in a modern data stack, with the help of the Operations and Data engineering teams, with the implementation of Snowflake. The data warehouse will be essential to lift future blockers, such as attribution, lead scoring, and analyzing complex multi-touch funnels at the company level. One thing we tried was to deploy an outbound platform, Salesloft, and unfortunately, it has not been a success. The vendor oversold its integration capacities and the resulting processes were cumbersome which is the opposite of what you want when dealing with outbound involving sales time…

Adding a layer of management

Growing your team will of course mean adding a layer of middle management. Based on experience I think a middle manager should manage at least 3 people. Below this number, the value added by the additional layer is questionable.

Adding a mid-manager to the team, you’ll have to rebuild your RACI and evolve your rituals to leave enough autonomy to the newly promoted or hired manager. But on the other hand, you want to avoid the development of silos.

We found good solutions to deal with this. First, we kept our dailys with the whole team but we created slack channels for people to asynchronously tell the rest of the team what they will tackle during the week and on Fridays, what they actually delivered. Keeping the daily meetings to discuss open questions, adjustments, alignments and so on. It still works with 14, but I realize It will have to evolve at some point when we continue to grow.

The second solution aims at keeping a communication channel between team members and the CMO. We have put in place skip-the-level meetings. Every other month each team member has a one-to-one with me during which we address topics like company strategy, career path, advice, etc. It is a way for me to keep direct contact but also for the team members to get unfiltered feedback or information.

Deploying Career Ladders

Finding the right profiles is quite difficult so you want to retain them. Giving visibility on a career path is a critical component of people’s motivation. Laying out the different steps and what is expected both in terms of soft skills and technical expertise is a very interesting exercise.

We have developed a marketing career ladder for each of the main roles starting from an engineering ladder that contained most of the soft skills elements and adding all elements relative to technical skills. It is true that marketing has very different profiles in small quantities, but I still believe that giving a good vision of the progression path is worth the effort.

This tool helps each team member and even myself (I build my own ladder :-) ) get a growth mindset, imagine their future, understand where they are at the given moment and take ownership of their progression. If you know where you sit on your career path, you can set and work towards goals that will take you to the next level.

It gives also a more meaningful basis for career progression conversations and allows better comparison as the elements are objectively presented.

I did not find many resources or templates on marketing career ladders, so feel free to reach out if you are interested to discuss this topic further.

Assessing your tactics’ maturity

In 2021 we activated most tactics available and in 2022 we were able to run them, experiment and assess their effectiveness. As a post-series B we need to balance innovation and Optimization. The team members have to master both approaches and the ladder mentioned above helps outline the missing skills. It is also the right moment to assess our tactics’ maturity and set objectives to move them up the maturity ladder.

We use a 5-phase scale:

• Experiments
• Positive signals
• Repeatability
• Operationalize
• Fully integrated

For each tactic, we evaluate where we are and what is missing to move to the next phase. This assessment is done quarterly and allows to set clear objectives and action plans to improve the overall engine.

An interesting example is SEO, for which we started with an agency until we hired a team member who could take it from where it was and operationalize it completely. The approach has been successful and we have been able to benefit from the internalization (better understanding of the offer, content available and audience dynamics) while building from an already solid situation.

Accelerating your production volume

Adding fuel to the engine both in dollars and people’s time should translate into production volume. Beware of meeting sprawl, push people to work asynchronously, and meet only when decisions or discussion is absolutely needed. It is important to revisit some of your processes and spot elements that generate inefficiency.

I like to say that marketing is like a factory, we need constant output and flawless production. And to get to this you need to make sure you have quality checks, emergency management capacities, deep understanding of your data. This is why we have an operation and data team member. At first, this resource should cover your “run”, ensuring everything works smoothly, and then do some “build”. You can even externalize some of the build to gain time and when the POC is proven efficient internalize the run. In 2023 we will test this for BDRs and for Intent management.

Finetuning your measuring

Piling up data year over year allows you to finetune your models. One of the most complex models in a BtoB enterprise environment is the North Star metric one. Finding the right elements to create your prediction model is not an easy task. If you are interested in this subject I suggest you read Dave Kellogg’s blog, he is an expert! Building your model will help in terms of marketing and sales alignment and will outline your business dynamics: close rate, deal size thresholds, lead time, and conversion rates. Setting marketing objectives and predicting sales outcomes is not an easy task and needs ongoing refinement. As the team leader you have to keep an eye on the score and your team too but don’t forget that you won’t win the game unless you focus on it.

Looking ahead

I think a team is an ecosystem that needs some time to adjust to new components, this is why you should be mindful of keeping some pauses between big waves of hires in order to stabilize and have everyone fully operational before you grow again. In 2023 we aim at growing our ARR another 2x, so back to work full steam ahead!