How do you know your startup is ready for marketing leadership?
Signals to look for, DIY or search firm, common mistakes founders make.
Reading time: 7 minutes
In one of my earlier posts, I advised early-stage startups not to hire a head of marketing. However, there is a time when a startup is legitimately ready for marketing leadership. This post will cover:
Five signals that your startup is ready for a marketing leader
Do-it-yourself hiring
Hiring a search firm
How to interview a search firm
Common mistakes founders make while hiring a leader
Five signals that your startup is ready for a marketing leader
🛑 Decision-making gridlock: If you find your startup is struggling to make critical GTM decisions like: Should we go to events? Which ones? Should we invest in building community or not? Paid advertising? What is our PR strategy? If you find your marketing team spinning cycles on these topics, spending hours in meetings unable to pull a strategy and plan together, that’s one sign that you might be ready for a head of marketing. Also, if every major GTM decision needs CEO approval, that’s also a sign to ramp up leadership roles at the startup.
⛺️ Lack of structure impacting growth: If there’s a lack of clarity around functional ownership and important activities that directly or indirectly impact revenue fall through the cracks, it’s a sign that your marketing team is not passing the baton smoothly as they run the growth race. I’ve also seen the right people in the wrong roles. Their best skills aren’t being leveraged, and instead, they are plugging holes that they are not best suited to plug.
🪺 All growth eggs in one or two baskets: This is surprisingly common. Say your startup has a content marketer and an email marketer/CRM person. All your marketing resources are focused on these two functions, thereby underinvesting in other important channels and marketing strategies. Over-investing in one channel is a risk (just like investing all your money in Tesla stock), and it may stop yielding results because you’re over-utilizing that one channel.
🙆🏽♀️ Marketing team over-stretched: If you are a fast-growth startup with just one or two marketers, you may quickly outgrow your marketing team. If you find your team running around like chickens with their heads cut off, working evenings and weekends to manage the programs, they are being overstretched. If they burn out or quit, your entire marketing function is at risk.
🛠️Market needs outpace team skills: Are you targeting a new market? Are you taking your company international? Do you find your market positioning unclear and confusing? Then, your growth might have outpaced your team’s current capabilities. You’ll need a senior leader (or at least a fractional/interim leader) to set strategy and guide your GTM efforts.
So now you are ready to hire a head of marketing. How should you go about finding that perfect marketer for your startup?
There are two ways you can go about a senior leadership search:
Do it yourself (DIY)
Hire a search firm
The DIY approach
If you choose to go with the DIY approach, make sure you have the following in place:
Your story - why should a rockstar marketer choose you over other alternatives? This post, Power of a differentiated narrative, might help.
Your social media channels give you a good brand impression.
Glassdoor, Crunchbase, AngelList, and other places a candidate might research.
Press coverage.
Founders often underestimate the effort required to hire a good senior leader. Unless they have strong board referrals and a broad network they can tap into, this will be more complicated than most founders anticipate. Finding and hiring the right candidate can take 3-6 months.
Matthew Hinde, partner at the boutique executive search firm Charles Vernon, which focuses exclusively on marketing hires, has this advice for founders:
“Ideally, you do an internal calibration process first. Search for LinkedIn profiles that look like people you would hire. Reach out to them and ask for an informal conversation. This helps you calibrate further. Alternatively, you can use your internal team—that’s a targeted search and it takes time and skill to enact. When you advertise a role on LinkedIn, you might get lucky, but you are scatter-gunning a search and wasting time.”
If you go the DIY route, you must take a targeted approach and dedicate the time necessary for outreach. Founders might benefit from having a conversation with a search expert. A search firm can help them calibrate and understand when they should do the search themselves and when it might make sense to hire a firm.
Hire a search firm
The other alternative is to hire a search firm or a search consultant. Many founders shy away from search firms because of the cost. Many firms will take on a search but may not care enough to see it through, so finding the right firm/consultant for you is essential.
Firms specializing in certain types of hires, such as technical or GTM, are an excellent place to start.
A good search firm will spend time understanding your category, vision, and product. They will work with founders to calibrate the role and present a wide variety of profiles (some that are a good fit and some that are not) so they understand how the founder thinks and prioritizes.
“Every founder is different. Some founders will look at the person’s education, some will look at the brands they have worked for, and some will look at the content they write or how technical they are. Sometimes, they think they want a CMO, and after speaking to them, we might advise them to go for an up-and-coming, real athletic marketer at a director level.” —Matthew Hinde, Partner, Charles Vernon.
How to interview a search firm
Here are a few tips Matthew Hinde has to offer for interviewing and selecting the right search partner for you.
Who is going to be leading your search? Talk to the actual person who will be working on your search. Do they get your company and your product? Can they sell you as well as you can?
What were their last five searches? How many of those previous five searches were for a head of marketing? Do they have a focused, specialized network or a broad network? What will serve you best?
Can they reference their most recent searches? Recency matters as it calibrates to the current market conditions. Talking to the founders directly about their most recent searches will give you a good sense of what to expect.
Can you connect with them? They will be representing and working with you, so do you like them? Do you get along with them? Can you trust their advice and opinion?
Common mistakes founders make when looking for a head of marketing
⁉️ Don’t know what they want: Founders can’t pull the trigger on the search because they haven’t defined what they want in a head of marketing. Scoping the role and calibrating the process with a short list of must-haves and nice-to-haves is the first place to start. Doing this exercise will save you a ton of time and energy.
🧶 Over-engineer the process: This is common with technical founders who tend to over-complicate the process. They want to run too many exercises and tests with potential candidates. Marketing needs a good balance of left and right brain. It’s a combination of experience, strategy, and good instincts.
🙅🏽♂️ Too many people weighing in: You don’t need the entire company to interview the candidate. Get clear on who needs to weigh in on the hire and who the final decision maker is so you don’t make a consensus-driven hire.
🤠CEO or co-founder is the CMO: This is often a tricky situation. If the founder or co-founder has strong opinions and ideas on running marketing and is unwilling to let go of some of that control, the search can take longer, and you can end up with many failed starts.
Pro Tip: Hire for the stage you are in right now, not for where you will be. Your head of marketing may or may not grow with your startup. Frankly, most don’t. You will need a different kind of marketer at the scaling stage than at the growth stage. Don’t hire for tomorrow; hire for today.