Hiring the first head of marketing at a startup
helenmin.com
helenmin.com
My advice to those hiring HoM for a B2B startup:
1. Hire a performance marketer (i.e. leads, revenue focused), not a brand marketer. Your sales team needs leads to grow, not "brand awareness". Once you've got a nice flow of leads, that's when the softer side of marketing becomes important.
2. If they are focused on how big of a budget they'll get, that's a major red flag. The first channels should not be paid. Budget needs to be small to start -- once you prove ROI/traction, it's now a conversation about scaling quickly, and not about blindly throwing money away.
3. A quick look at their resume or LinkedIn should tell you everything you need to know... is it full of numbers/data, or is it a list of tasks & buzzword bingo?
4. Hire someone who can do everything themselves. Make sure they won't need to rely on agencies.
Edit: Regarding the article's recommendation about hiring ICs to perform smaller tasks. I personally would find this unappealing because it means I can't build my own initial team, and I'll need to investigate what those ICs have done so far -- have they made poor decisions I'll need to undo?
A few points I'd like to mention though:
> If they are focused on how big of a budget they'll get, that's a major red flag.
I think it's fair to ask is there any money for this? and is there a revenue stream (even just a trickle?) yet? If you're going to potentially be the head of marketing you might want to see that the CEO has their head on straight and has made some sort of progress.
> Hire someone who can do everything themselves. Make sure they won't need to rely on agencies.
I'm not convinced this is practical in all cases. Sometimes the right move is to let someone else take something off your plate. Finding someone who errs on the side of 'I can do that myself' is probably the right choice though.
I've found that sometimes the existing gap in the team could be positioning, messaging, or just a basic onboarding process--you would expect those things to disappear around a Series A raise but it's just wishful thinking in my experience and companies are not vacuums.
Finding a solid performance marketer is probably easier than nailing those things. To your point, if you've got traction, deep expertise, and the foundation for marketing set then performance is the focus next. Appreciate the B2B perspective!
Positioning, messaging, and onboarding are all really important to startups and need attention. But they shouldn't be the focal point right away. In my experience, positioning/messaging are more of an iterative process of evolution & refinement over time (via experimentation). Spending 80% of your time on this at the start will not solve the immediate problem of leads/demand.
From a strategic perspective, the focus at the start should be on organic performance, targeting the bottom of the funnel. Put most of your chips on what will drive leads, that are ready to buy, at the lowest investment possible.
Once the sales team is struggling to keep up, you can look at moving up the funnel and reprioritizing.
Edit: Not all niches are the same, so this is more of a generalization.
To expand a bit for those outside of this space, a performance marketer is often called a direct response marketer. They measure the direct response to everything they do. The alternative is often called an awareness marketer. They tend to focus on creative that can create awareness.
2.) A b2b startup just turning on revenue and looking to show a profit typically needs to validate a really high return from marketing efforts. The salary of a marketing head isn’t free. Do the math off what it cost to acquire revenues and profits off that salary. (e.g. $120k/year to a contractor for this role is $10k/month to the company, that should buy you at least a 2X in profit (you really want to be at 4x in profit) if you are in b2b). Once you have something working you need budget to pour fuel on the fire and get it going.
3.) Disagree here. Plenty of information can be considered confidential by employers and may not be published.
4.) Initially true but Agencies add value as you increase spending. They likely have negotiated better ad rates than your single startup can manage so you’ll save on spend by going through them. Also, don’t discount the creative they can do. Nearly all big companies have struck a working partnership with an agency over creative works the agency designed. There is value here but don’t expect them to figure out your initial strategy. Also, avoid agencies that don’t have good ad spend like the plague. Recently spoke to one that bragged about an average 1.2X return on Capital to their customers in top line revenue from advertising. For every dollar we would spend they would likely bring us $1.20 in revenue. That’s horrible. I can do better with direct mail.
Exactly. The parent comment was spot-on about not hiring someone who is wholly dependent on external agencies to get anything done. Avoid people who are basically middlemen between your company and external agencies. You're better off going directly to the agencies in that case.
You want someone who can chart the initial strategy and then judiciously augment with external agencies when appropriate.
You can also become a performance marketer if you are inclined. Takes times, but not a lot of money. If you are interested in this sort of thing go watch some Jay Abraham videos on youtube.
If someone wants to seriously go down this path, you can learn a lot on your own, but it can also short circuit your learning to get a job somewhere that has experts you can learn from, and invest in your education that way.
To expand on this as a marketer that can "do all the things"...
This in many ways requires this person to be technical on some level. Perhaps not an engineer, but comfortable talking to one, someone who understand how tracking works at a technical level, and someone who can handle hands-on configuration of a CRM/ESP, ad platforms, tag management, analytics, etc., writing specs for developers where needed, and generally knowing enough to know when they are out of their depth technically to mitigate security and data liability risk.
The last one is important to ensure a company is adhering to privacy legislation. Often engineers do not know what sorts of data live in the martech stack, as their may not have access or know where to look.
While I agree with most of the rest of your points, I'd disagree with the budget and first channels. If a company's aspirations and timeline require a large budget, it can be pretty important to know that up front. There are definitely scenarios where those are out of line with expectations and reality. Also, paid media and things that are more easily controlled/measurable/scalable may indeed be more appropriate to get going quickly than things like content marketing which, while important (especially for B2B), is often a slower buildup. Again, it is very circumstantial. What works in one situation may not be the best choice for another, which is what a competent marketer will help sort out and devise tests around.
Full disclosure: I am not a recruitment specialist so that's probably where the issue was
Marketing will want to launch marketing campaigns: adwords, facebook, ads in the tube, sponsoring events, sponsoring personalities, TV ads...
The smallest ad here and there start at 100k each. It's very quick to burn millions of dollars. It's unbelievable how quick money can go down the drain. Besides, the more they spend the better for their resume so marketing is really enticed to go big.
When the founder wants to start marketing. He's probably budgeting to hire a couple people and do some things but he doesn't comprehend the costs. One or two years later, when the founder sees the bills and the lack of returns, he's pulling the plug on marketing.
In that sense marketing is like software projects. When your CMO/CTO shows up with a 200 pages spec software / $500k ad project, the answer is to say no. Both type of projects tend to spiral out of control quickly and fail.
Part of this misunderstanding derives from what was hinted at in the article in that the valley has basically a complete lack of understanding of what marketing is.
"What's your marketing budget? We can help you spend it!"
That's what agencies say.
Some marketing managers may like to talk about 'budget spend' but that's only one part of what they do, and remember that every 'marketing manager' knows how fickle spend is and is not going to care about 'spend' but rather 'ROI' on that spend.
In my experience, the key is to hire someone who understands your market first, not just the art of marketing in general. If their first step after hiring is to do market research to begin to understand the customers, you’re probably too late. You need to get a head start with someone who already knows the industry and the market so they can skip straight to spending marketing budgets where they are known to work well. In parallel they can research additional avenues that could compliment the startup’s unique position.
Those are “brand” advertising techniques still popular among legacy CPG brands who are stuck in the old world. Those are the campaigns with no exact way to measure returns other than educated guesses.
Any properly run startup today is focusing the majority of ad spend on “direct response,” or direct sales ie. Facebook ads, google AdWords, etc. or actual human sales teams.
This spending is 100% measurable so any company paying more to acquire customers than the customer’s exact LTV is simply dumb or trying some nefarious loss leader strategy.
Facebook and Google sit at the top of S&P 500 right now because their ad networks are so measurable and perfectly targeted.
There is no problem with a lack of visible returns on Facebook or google ad spend.
Fact #2 that most inside a given (startup) brand find hard to swallow is this:
Nobody cares. About your product, or your brand.
Sure, there's an audience of early adopters, and maybe you're gotten traction there. But once you get past "the cool kids" the dynamic changes. As you venture towards the middle of a market, people like their status quo. A wink, a smile and "try me, I'm new" isn't going to cut it.
Or maybe you're a B2B play. Yeah, (e.g.) banks are great customers. Do you think you're the only one with that in mind? Do you understand how slow they are to evolve? And...They don't care. You need them. They don't need you.
Solving tech problems is _easy_ relative to growth-seeking marketing (and advertising).
Modern digital marketing is focused on measurability and ROI. Even traditional marketing can be measured, it's just a bit harder.
When you hire your first head of marketing, make sure they are ROI and results focused. A quick look at their resume or LinkedIn should tell you everything you need to know... is it full of numbers/data, or is it a list of tasks & buzzword bingo?
>"The smallest ad here and there start at 100k each"
This is flat out a false statement. The smallest ad you can run is whatever the minimum spend is in whatever publisher you're buying from which is often a few bucks. You won't get visible returns with this (in a statistical sense at least), but it is doable.
>"lack of (visible) returns"
Any marketer, especially ones doing an ad buy over some period of time approaching the $100k level who doesn't use analytics and/or incrementality tests to prove their results should not be touching that budget.
>"Besides, the more they spend the better for their resume so marketing is really enticed to go big."
I've reviewed many resumes and hired marketers and media professionals of all levels. If someone had big budgets listed on their resume, but couldn't back that up with details around the results and outcomes, and their role in delivering those, it would be a very short conversation. Likewise, I've been very impressed with some of the creative and impactful things people have done with smaller budgets that forced them to be scrappy. So bigger is not always better.
A bunch of other founders have told me they find this chart really useful.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1l-0VLKWIzqu2dwyxmmNJ...
Interesting comparison since a dentist's job is to fix problems (so why would they prefer a customer with no problems?). For other roles, it certainly sucks to fix the mess no one wanted to deal with anymore, but this is often the only thing that motivates hiring you in the first place.
The advice is sound (and applies to domains beyond marketing). Long term, you’re generally better off setting up some best practices early than ignoring them.
The same goes with my dentist. I once walked into a dentist as a new patient, all the dentist was interested in was the quiet life (i.e. selling me tooth whitening services). I walked out and never went back.
Frankly the entire blog post reads as sneering and looking down at small businesses, completely ingoring the realities of small business life which might prevent the hiring of some marketing types.
Its all very well if you live the cushy Silly Con valley "small business" life, but for most small businesses, the reality is different.
I'm sure all small businesses would love to employ armies of sales, marketing, technical etc. etc. ... but let's get away from the MBA textbook into real life shall we ?
the core of modern digital marketing is content. As an example, I was involved in an adverse possession lawsuit. I started searching for articles about adverse possession. A few law firms had very good articles about adverse possession. They went into case law, examples of winning/losing etc., but most law firms just said they did adverse possession. Consumers are much more likely to buy from vendors that also give them the information they need to make a decision.
Content can be product videos, great product descriptions, tools to help make product decisions, how to use the product to achieve goals, forums etc.
The content needs to drive the next step in the buying process. Signing up for a mailing list, requesting help, putting something in the shopping cart.
Once you have content with actions you can start using paid ads to drive traffic to your content.
Once your content gets traffic you will start rising in organic search.
Using analytics you can optimize conversions, run experiments, etc. It requires daily or weekly monitoring and constant calculation of return.
You can ask most marketing people what a standard deviation is and they have no idea, let alone a two tailed T-test. How can they be testing effectiveness with zero understanding of statistics? When is a 10% increase an actual increase vs. statistical noise?
I think a strong IC Sales + Marketing, who can work solo, generate revenue (Sales), while thinking longer term and process (Mktg + sales op), would be a killer.
Does it exist or am I dreaming? Anybody has such experience, seen it working or not?
Similarly, yes, there’s plenty of people that have a grasp of both sales and marketing to some degree. But there’s only so many hours in a day.
Early stage b2b salespeople would, pre covid, spend all their time in between customer meetings in the car on the way to next one. Hard to implement a solid early stage marketing strategy behind the wheel.
I currently do software engineering/dev, account management, sales (sort of), and business management by myself. Small biz, not a startup, profitable enough to pay a fair salary after mine.
I'd rather start with one person than 2, and I'll have a hard time believing that 2 people is absolutely necessary where 0.2 is the current situation.
I would recommend all technical founders read that book. If anything it gives you a good frame or reference you can use to interview people with...
If you are going to interview a potential head of marketing, they should be able to explain the same high level thinking that the book presents, in terms of testing 1 or 2 channels, focusing on those channels until they are maxed out, and then opening up or using other channels for the next phase of growth.
If a rough growth plan doesn't invoke the same concepts as the book I would be skeptical they really know how to grow/scale a startup business properly.
On top of that, early on you should have a list of all the potential channels that could work for your business, in order to understand from the beginning how far you could probably scale your business, in order to make sure the venture is worth the time and building the product isn't a waste. If based on the uniqueness of your product, idea, service, etc there aren't many traditional channels available (or you couldn't make them work somehow) then that should be a warning sign.
I think of the startup path as basically the options of:
- Scrappy: start with content marketing / generalist for basics, potentially via a senior VP/CMO consultant/advisor + founder, and then get a full-timer. Bigger question is Sales or Marketing full-timer first. After content table stakes, switches to experiments to figure out strategy (ads, devrel, viral freemium, ...): Most bang will come from a couple things, so need someone experienced enough to experiment to find them. If things are going well, can get the advisor as an early superstar hire, or at least basics setup for one.
- well-Funded and with fit: Hire someone to build the team and guide them through experiments.
Note in both cases, someone senior in startup experience, esp for your segment, is useful, even if as an active advisor / consultant.
A trickier q to me is when to fire the marketing lead, esp as things are still getting figured out. Once fit is achieved, it is more of a numbers and process game, but before then...
Based on that experience I think the right agencies can fill the marketing need quite well for startups. I think the main concern is that the knowledge isn’t completely outsourced so there is a core of competence in the company. In my experience it’s much easier to find solid expertise across the multitude of marketing channels with agencies, even though it’s likely more expensive.
I like the idea of getting individual contributors first to kick things off, but then I’d look for agencies as a next step. This could coincide with a CMO hire because many marketers have worked with agencies in the past so they will help in the search for the right partners.
I didn't get past the last one and lasted for a year - marketing isn't 'all fluff' but it is a very different beast from the tech industry and has a relatively short term mindset. Build something in 30 days, build something else completely after that, build something else again in the next 30 - I burned out after a year and whilst I'm grateful for the learnings and opportunity it afforded me, I will never stray from what I know again.
I think this is part of the disconnect we have.
The only exception I’d make here is if your UX person is able to implement their suggestions themselves, without dragging people away from other work.
If it’s a Saas product and you aren’t able to close leads due to a lack of product features, then sure, don’t hire someone to design what you already don’t have the resources to build.
However, I doubt this is OP’s problem. I’m guessing they already have some traction, and are having customer complaints about the general usability or are losing to more polished competitors. In this case, it’s stupid not to bring in specialist design help.
Hiring more construction workers to work on a poorly architected building won’t suddenly make it more appealing to tenants. If the architecture is the problem, hire an architect!
Good design can change the trajectory of your product and make it a lasting success, bad design can waste your resources working on the wrong thing and sink your business entirely.
Chances are, at this stage you don’t have the money to hire a good designer, and if you don’t know much about design (which it sounds like you don’t), you’re likely going to hire an inexperienced/bad designer—-and it might even make your product worse.
I’d hire a more expensive (in the short term) freelancer or agency that can show multiple portfolio case studies directly relating to what you do. Save the full time salary for after the more expensive (and more experienced) freelancer/agency has set the direction. Then bring in the just-out-of-school kid (which is all you’ll probably get at startup salaries and with no brand recognition) to follow the direction you’ve already set.
Thought the article there’s mention of chiefs, coaches, managers, and I kinda wonder why for marketing it comes out to be a “head”.
Naively it feels like a head -> body image with a strong top down connotation, people below that role becoming string puppets to the “brain”.
Still feels weird if you have both a COO and a “Head of operations”, but I guess that’s a complex situation to start with.
>Still feels weird if you have both a COO and a “Head of operations”, but I guess that’s a complex situation to start with.
It's fairly common to have a CTO and a Head of Engineering but I'm not sure if there's that sort of responsibility split on operations as well. In the eng case, the HoE generally focuses on team management while the CTO focuses on strategy/architecture/whatever. Often the case when the CTO is a founder and no one wants to remove their title but they're not scaling as a manager.
- Stretch candidate: A great hire for most seed/A startups is someone who is a great Director at a slightly later-stage co and wants to move to VP or C (marketing, product, whatever). They still know how to actually work, have ownership + management experience, are hungry, and want that next title. So Director -> "VP of X" is a good leap for them. Likewise, a regular leader or area leader ("Director of Content Marketing") -> Director.
- Room: At the same time, it's useful to keep 1-2 slots above any role. As things progress, you may want to grow the team. You can give the current person a promotion if they're rocking it and looks like they can keep growing with the company. Conversely, if they're good but too risky for them to own that next 10X of growth, this gives you a chance to hire above them without firing them. (Chance they'll still leave / be replaced, but at least this way everyone walks away a winner without 1-2q of business disruption.)
- Authority: Title do communicate internally + externally who owns X, which simplifies collaboration & decision making. Hierarchy of titles and how they cover ownership areas matters here, vs. what they precisely are.
And yeah, "Head of X" is a good placeholder until a clearer structure makes sense. Ex: senior engineer, and unclear if they'll focus more on VP Eng, Architect, Tech Lead, etc. as team grows. Individuals may prefer this for themselves b/c they may not know themselves what they want to do next in general.
Conversely, doing this badly means: Someone may reject the job, drama / quitting right when you're growing, trickier compensation, ... .
- Marketing leadership tenure is definitely short. Average lifespan for a CMO is supposedly 23 months. I can see it. The great irony about this is that I'll often hear people say, about a marketing leader's resume, is that "it has a lot of short stays" - showing that they are relatively unaware of the dynamics of the role.
- The kind of marketer you hire depends a lot on the size of your company and your go-to-market motion. As the author correctly points out, at the beginning, you are better off hiring a performance marketer, content marketer, or product marketer - depending on your product and the problems you're trying to solve.
- If you're selling an enterprise software product, you should probably hire a product marketer first to support that team, especially since attracting enterprise clients generally doesn't come from, say content marketing or, say, SEM. That's not saying it doesn't happen - it does, but it just far less common.
- If you're selling a solution that can be bought off the website, then you should probably start with a content marketer or performance marketer. If the ASP is low, then these are likely a requirement for the business to work - marketing is your sales team.
- In my experience, you generally hire a VP or CMO when you've reached somewhere around $10m in revenue. I've typically been brought in here.
- Usually, the founders will tell you that they really care about brand and perception in the market. Don't fall for it. All they care about is leads.
- As a marketer joining a company, what I think you should be looking for is a company and product that has a clear mission, and clear sense of who they are marketing to. If you don't have these, as a marketer, you'll just about always fail (and I've had that experience). There are, of course, exceptions - some companies do create a new product category, but most of the time you're going into an existing market.
- Be extremely skeptical of the founder saying they are forming a new market - most of the time it means that they really don't have a buyer or budget, or that they exist "In between" product categories which can be extremely challenging because you'll be competing against product in multiple categories with functionality deficiencies that can make it very hard to win. Maybe just as important, it will be incredibly hard for you to create compelling messaging around such a product.
- The most common situation I see is this: company has achieved decent product/market fit, and has grown to approximately $3-5m using primarily content marketing. However, it's largely tapped out. This isn't always the case - if a startup is going after a very horizontal, broad market, that has a large online audience, then these strategies can scale much better. But my experience is with high tech, B2B companies - often very "niche" - so they tap out. The solution that the founder have come to, along with their Board, is that they need to build a real marketing team. So they're bringing in a VP of Marketing to "fix it" and allow them to continue the growth required to validate their valuation.
This is a dangerous place for a marketing leader. The expectations are incredibly high, and you don't know what marketing can really do to help. Again, the founders will sell you on brand, etc - but it's all about the leads. This situation is often the reason for high marketing leadership turnover. They need leads, they bring in a VP, she or he tries to scale it through other channels like events, outbound, etc - and doesn't see enough success in the extremely short window and they are shown the door.
One other interesting thing often happens in these situations - as the VP of Marketing, you bring actual measurement tools/analytics that allow you to precisely measure what is working and what is not. And then you find out that the metrics they were using were bullshit and the situation is even harder than you thought.
- Marketing leaders are shown the door because they often come up with marketing strategy/tactics/messaging that the founders just don't agree with. The leader may be right, or the founder may be right - but these conflicts make for quick exits. Founders can be extremely stubborn, and some may suffer the dreaded "I've been successful in this one area, and now I feel I am a master of all areas."
- Marketing leaders are shown the door because they don't know what they're doing. You need a very broad skill set in my opinion to be a successful VP at a startup - understanding everything from analyst relations, to SEO, to how run marketing automation and a huge amount of other technology. I've had friends at startups talk to me about their new VP of Marketing who didn't understand how browser cookies worked. That guy did not last long.
- East coast vs. west coast high tech marketing is night and day. West Coast have a go big or go home approach. They will spend 5-10x current revenue on marketing with the intention of just dominating that market. East coast companies almost always have much more conservative approach. I've seen companies succeed and fail with both.
- In my experience with, again, relatively niche B2B high tech solution, Google Ads words and most paid spend produce results that make it difficult to justify the spend. I'll couch this by saying that I'm sure there are successes out there, and that maybe I just suck at it, but I've done it across multiple companies and have rarely seen truly scalable success. I think you're better off figuring out how to get your content spread as far and wide as possible vs. paid digital spend.
This is all, obviously, my experience - your mileage may vary! Ramble over, comments welcome.
I also wonder if early-stage marketers can get a lot of credibility / leverage in their organizations by focusing on product marketing.
Other random observation – a lot of marketers seem to not be able to figure out what works, and then the solution they offer is spending more money. (This isn't always a marketing problem, could be a product issue that the marketing team can't influence.)