Why your CMO wants to quit your startup

Top reasons founders lose their head of marketing and how to keep them.

Hello, I’m Hema, and welcome to my newsletter First Impression. Each month, I write an in-depth post on positioning, brand, or GTM strategy for early-stage startups. Join startup founders, GTM leaders, and practitioners, and subscribe to get the newsletter in your inbox.

Finding a great VP of Marketing or a CMO is not an easy task because marketing looks very different at different stages of a startup (early, growth, hyper-growth, scale) and different business models (consumer, SaaS, enterprise, marketplace, etc.,) It can take 3-4 months to hire this role, and up to 6 months for the marketing leader to add meaningful value to your startup. If they quit in 12-18 months, you’ve just spent a lot of time and money on a hire that did not contribute to your startup’s growth.

Assuming you already have a rock-solid hiring process and have found a fantastic candidate that everyone is excited about, how can you retain them and make them a real agent of growth? This post will cover why marketing leaders quit their startups and what founders can do to set them up for success.

Misaligned on strategic direction

Your head of marketing, alongside your head of sales, is responsible for driving growth, and to do this effectively, they need to be 100% aligned with you on the following:

What problem are you solving? They need to be aligned with the founders on what problem the product is solving and for whom. I once advised a startup where the head of product (the co-founder) had a very strong opinion about which persona she was designing the product for, and the head of marketing had an entirely different target persona she thought they should be going after.

What is your primary go-to-market approach? For example, if you hired a head of marketing with deep expertise in product-led growth and then hired a sales leader a few months down the road to close bigger deals, your head of marketing has to figure out how to layer on a sales-assisted motion to the existing PLG motion. This is not something you can switch on overnight. A thoughtful process must be established and fine-tuned before it can work for you.

What are your startup’s top priorities? If the top priority for the startup is deep product integrations to drive strategic ecosystem partnerships and your head of marketing’s charter is to drive PLG, those two priorities will be in direct conflict with one another. What’s a higher priority? How does the marketer fit into that priority? Thinking through these questions will also help you determine what kind of marketer (data-driven? or brand-driven?) and at what level (director? VP? CMO?).

“Most senior marketing hires will be able to navigate shifts between expectations and reality, but where it gets particularly tricky when you're expecting to build out a team but get no budget, or if you're looking to build or add PLG but the GTM remains sales-led. These are fundamental shifts in strategy, and a capable senior marketing hire will be able to quickly tell whether they still fit the new shape of this role.” — Kevan Lee, VP Marketing, Rattle and ex-VP Marketing, Oyster.

Continuous founder education

Most founders get product and technology, some even come from a marketing background, but that’s still pretty rare in tech. Most founders don’t understand what marketing is all about. For some, it’s growth; for some, it’s supporting sales; and for others, it’s content creation or community building.

A head of marketing joining a startup with first-time founders who haven’t experienced managing a marketing function before is often put in a position of educating the founders on what marketing can and should be responsible for and why they need specific tools and resources to do their job well.

“One reason why a head of marketing may leave a startup is that educating the CEO or founders on the marketing function becomes too big a part of their role. They may be focused on helping founders understand what marketing does and why rather than doing the actual marketing and that can become exhausting.” — Katy Engle, Talent Partner, Gradient Ventures

Here’s some good advice from Katy for first-time founders on hiring a head of marketing:

• Talk to as many great marketers as possible to understand their job functions, skillsets, and scope. Have at least ten conversations to inform yourself.

• Consider contracting with an interim CMO or a capable marketing consultant on a short-term basis to test the waters to see if the organization is ready for a head of marketing.

• Talk to a search firm that specializes in that sector. They will know what good looks like, and they can provide sound advice.

Poor resourcing and fuzzy scope

When you hire a VP of marketing, be prepared to support them with the right resources. This includes people, budget, tools, and technological support. I’ve personally come across this short list almost every single time I’ve taken on a head of marketing role:

• No design resources: There’s a design team or a product designer that reports to the product organization, and they have to squeeze in marketing design requests. A product designer’s skillset is very different from a brand designer’s skillset, and unless they are experienced in both, their designs will not work well for marketing.

• No engineering support: The website has been built internally by engineers who now have other product priorities, and there is no clear path to managing or transitioning the legacy site over to a best-in-class CMS.

• No data support: There is no CRM platform, and all your data is in some legacy database that a marketer cannot access without writing SQL.

Here are a few examples of scope-related topics to discuss with the head of marketing before getting them on board:

• Who do SDRs report to? Marketing or sales?

• If you have a growth team, how do they work with product and demand generation? What’s their scope?

• What about data and analytics? Is there a central team that supports data needs, or does each team have its own analyst?

• Is there a marketing ops or revenue ops function? How does marketing interface with them?

A good head of marketing should ask these questions and get clear answers from the CEO/founder or at least commit to getting these questions answered before they get on board. Otherwise, they are running the gauntlet from day one, and you, as a founder, have not set them up for success.

Responsibility without the authority

When founders hire a head of marketing, they want to hold them responsible for driving growth and revenue. Still, they are not always ready to let go of the decision-making authority that needs to go with those responsibilities. Understandably, founders want to be involved in major strategic decisions, and your head of marketing should get your input before making those decisions. But founders must get out of the execution lane. Your head of marketing should have the authority to build a team, hire or fire team members, and have direct control and discretion over resources.

“Often, there can be a “shadow hand” from a CEO or from a Head of Sales / CRO that is dictating marketing plans. This can happen innocently enough by, say, an overexuberant CEO who is full of ideas, or it can happen by virtue of a lack of trust or an abundance of fear from the C-level. Both make it very hard for the marketing leader to feel ownership of outcomes and autonomy to do their job.”— Kevan Lee, VP Marketing, Rattle and ex-VP Marketing, Oyster.

Turning marketing spend on and off

Marketing spend is often the first thing that goes when cost-cutting measures are embraced. However, this can be as foolish as cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Your marketing spend drives growth as paid media or organic growth via brand, social media, and content. If you cut this off, you will see signups and leads nosedive, and sometimes you won’t feel the impact until after a few months.

When you begin to turn everything back on, it’ll take a few months for results to materialize. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see founders making. Marketing is not a switch you flip on and off. The engine takes time to warm up, gain momentum, and produce results.

Not shifting gears when you hit hyper-growth

Marketing at 0-$2M ARR vs. $10M-$50M ARR vs. $100M+ ARR looks very, very different. When your startup hits that inflection point and takes off, it feels incredible, but it’ll also feel like drinking from the firehose. A head of marketing who is not properly supported, who has to yell and scream to get resources, will eventually give up and quit. A few things can hamper your strategic marketing efforts if you don’t adjust for hyper-growth:

• Not ramping up budget and resources: Your marketing is becoming more sophisticated and complex as you scale. You’ll need better processes, tools, and systems. You’ll probably need outside agencies and vendors. But you can’t run it without a proper budget, budgeting process, and clear metrics (CAC, ROAS, LTV, etc.) that steer marketing performance.

• Not understanding the importance of brand building: If you ask me, brand building is essential from the get-go (read this post on why B2B companies need to build a brand), but it becomes hugely important when your startup hits the hyper-growth stage. This is your moment to become the number #1 go-to solution in your space. Don’t blow this chance by not investing in a good brand strategy, branding design, and brand experience. Brand budgets don’t have the same metrics and measurements as a demand generation program. Founders who don’t understand the importance of a brand will under-invest in it or hold their heads of marketing to unreasonable ROI metrics.

• Not adding a second tier of management: As you grow and expand from 15 people to 100 to 500, your leadership team can face a lot of stress and burnout if you don’t add a second tier of management: Sr. managers, directors, or Sr. directors. No one person can effectively manage ten or fifteen people! If your leader is spending all their time and energy supporting direct reports and helping them fight fires, they cannot use their best skills — strategic thinking, planning, and storytelling — to benefit your startup. Eventually, they will get burnt out or frustrated and quit.

Sometimes, founders want to be involved in every single decision about the brand. However, part of the reason founders hire a CMO is to help make some of these decisions. Founders can and should still be involved with high level strategy, but late-stage CMOs may find it difficult if the founder is looking over their shoulder with every single decision they make about a piece of content or the company’s public-facing image. — Katy Engle, Talent Partner, Gradient Ventures

Setting up your marketing leader for success

• 90-day support: Ask your marketing leader how you can support them in their first 90 days. What do they expect from you? How frequently do you want to receive updates? How are decisions made in your startup? Have regular check-ins to unblock them and guide them. 👉🏽 Make your first 90 days count

• Top 3 priorities: Communicate your startup’s top three priorities to your new marketing leader and ask them how they would be contributing directly to these priorities. Ensure they are a key contributor to strategic initiatives and have a seat at the table to negotiate outcomes.

• Align on critical goals and outcomes: Have a robust discussion with your head of marketing on what they think their key goals and outcomes should be. What resources do they need to achieve them? What’s the timeline? What are the constraints?