Hiring the first head of marketing at a startup
So much to digest in the article and the comments - not sure where to begin. As background, I&#x27;ve been running marketing teams for high tech B2B companies for about 12 years. This will be just a rambling set of thoughts that come to me on a Saturday night. So, with that caveat, a few things in the article jump out at me:<p>- 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&#x27;ll often hear people say, about a marketing leader&#x27;s resume, is that &quot;it has a lot of short stays&quot; - showing that they are relatively unaware of the dynamics of the role.<p>- 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&#x27;re trying to solve.<p>- If you&#x27;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&#x27;t come from, say content marketing or, say, SEM. That&#x27;s not saying it doesn&#x27;t happen - it does, but it just far less common.<p>- If you&#x27;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.<p>- In my experience, you generally hire a VP or CMO when you&#x27;ve reached somewhere around $10m in revenue. I&#x27;ve typically been brought in here.<p>- Usually, the founders will tell you that they really care about brand and perception in the market. Don&#x27;t fall for it. All they care about is leads.<p>- 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&#x27;t have these, as a marketer, you&#x27;ll just about always fail (and I&#x27;ve had that experience). There are, of course, exceptions - some companies do create a new product category, but most of the time you&#x27;re going into an existing market.<p>- Be extremely skeptical of the founder saying they are forming a new market - most of the time it means that they really don&#x27;t have a buyer or budget, or that they exist &quot;In between&quot; product categories which can be extremely challenging because you&#x27;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.<p>- The most common situation I see is this: company has achieved decent product&#x2F;market fit, and has grown to approximately $3-5m using primarily content marketing. However, it&#x27;s largely tapped out. This isn&#x27;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 &quot;niche&quot; - 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&#x27;re bringing in a VP of Marketing to &quot;fix it&quot; and allow them to continue the growth required to validate their valuation.<p>This is a dangerous place for a marketing leader. The expectations are incredibly high, and you don&#x27;t know what marketing can really do to help. Again, the founders will sell you on brand, etc - but it&#x27;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&#x27;t see enough success in the extremely short window and they are shown the door.<p>One other interesting thing often happens in these situations - as the VP of Marketing, you bring actual measurement tools&#x2F;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.<p>- Marketing leaders are shown the door because they often come up with marketing strategy&#x2F;tactics&#x2F;messaging that the founders just don&#x27;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 &quot;I&#x27;ve been successful in this one area, and now I feel I am a master of all areas.&quot;<p>- Marketing leaders are shown the door because they don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;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&#x27;ve had friends at startups talk to me about their new VP of Marketing who didn&#x27;t understand how browser cookies worked. That guy did not last long.<p>- 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&#x27;ve seen companies succeed and fail with both.<p>- 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&#x27;ll couch this by saying that I&#x27;m sure there are successes out there, and that maybe I just suck at it, but I&#x27;ve done it across multiple companies and have rarely seen truly scalable success. I think you&#x27;re better off figuring out how to get your content spread as far and wide as possible vs. paid digital spend.<p>This is all, obviously, my experience - your mileage may vary! Ramble over, comments welcome.