Hiring Your First Head of Marketing
“Did you see that Stripe’s CMO is out?” a founder asked one day from the desk behind me.
Though I’d heard the news, the question had me curious for two reasons: First, I was two months into my own role as head of marketing of a fast-growing fintech startup and curious what my boss thought about the topic. Second, I had closely followed the woman in question and considered her a terrific marketer.
“It’s only been a year,” he continued. “She must’ve been bad.”
Revolving door
This exchange sticks with me years later because it’s emblematic of the mentality some technical founders hold about the role of marketing.
The thinking goes: Founders build great products that sell themselves through the power of network effects. When the need arises down the road, the company will hire a proven marketing professional to start a department from scratch while everyone’s at a full sprint. If it doesn’t work out…she must’ve been bad.
In fact, brief tenures and abrupt departures of CMOs have become the norm in Silicon Valley. By my count, the tenures of Robinhood’s first three CMOs combined add up to two years; Wealthfront’s first CMO lasted a year and half; and Intercom’s and Affirm’s first CMOs were both out in less than a year. At Dropbox, our first CMO (who I found to be a fantastic leader and marketer) stayed on for just over a year…
These marketers weren’t all “bad.” Most of them have stellar reputations, in fact. So what’s really going on?
Founder mentality
In Silicon Valley, marketing isn’t important—until it is.
Founders often disregard marketing for as long as possible, convincing themselves it’s “fluff.” A product manager can probably handle things like customer research, product positioning, and the external components of a product launch, and then hand them off to sales, right? After all, he has an MBA. :)
This works well enough in the early stages, but then problems emerge: Customer-facing team members struggle to stick to a consistent message in the market; information isn’t flowing between customers and product teams; taking turns managing the company Twitter account isn’t working; and the founders have to manage the press alias.
At the same time, the internal demand for marketing grows: Engineering needs better market insights; product needs successful launches; sales needs more compelling materials; executives need external comms support; HR needs help with recruiting and retention; and customer success needs to scale and automate a lot of customer comms.
Finally, something happens. The company gets ensnared in a PR crisis, needs to expand to new markets, or faces new competition. If only the company had better brand equity, visibility, or public sentiment, executives could stay focused on what’s important.
At this point, founders “give in” and kick off the search for a head of marketing to build the function.
‘Without a penny spent on marketing’
When recruiting for their first head of marketing, founders will sometimes declare enthusiastically, “Look how far we’ve gotten—and without a penny spent on marketing!”
I tell them this is analogous to walking into a dentist’s office and proclaiming, “Look how great my teeth look—and without a day of brushing! Do you want to be my first dentist?” Yuck.
If you didn’t believe in marketing for years, you probably aren’t set up for the function to succeed in the first place. Experienced marketers know this.
If they’ve done the job before, a candidate will know they’ll be juggling four jobs at the same time:
Job 1: Recruit, recruit, recruit;
Job 2: Define what marketing means at the company and educate the rest of the team;
Job 3: Help other departments succeed and scale; and
Job 4: Define the brand and tell stories to move the brand forward.
They also know they’ll be stepping into a mess and answering to executives who expect quick results. What’s more, with no team in place, they’ll be responsible for day-to-day activities they’ve been delegating for years (writing copy, setting up marketing dashboards, etc.)
Do they really want to start at the beginning, with no resources?
First hire a ‘super IC’ (or two)
Instead of following this failed playbook, I advise startups to think about marketing much earlier in the process and begin laying the foundation that a future leader can build on.
Set up a small team of one or two strong individual contributors to take on marketing duties. These should be generalists capable of handling a variety of marketing tasks (maybe consider making them product marketing managers). Have them set up basic infrastructure like a marketing automation tool that connects to your CRM and Google Analytics for your website and blog. Connect them to other departments to begin building websites optimized for conversions, developing simple campaigns, drafting brand messaging, and so on.
This is a win for the founder, who learns the different marketing functions much earlier in the process. It’s a win for the business generalist, who can find their passion while making an impact at the company. It’s a win for the future head of marketing, because someone will have already done some trial-and-error and gotten the marketing function off the ground. And it’s a win for the recruiter, because the job’s more attractive with someone already on the team cranking.
These super ICs won’t do all the jobs of a marketing head. They won’t recruit or necessarily even lead. But you’ll have people who understand marketing, speak the language, and can run experiments.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Like NFL coaches, heads of marketing experience a lot of turnover. Because marketing initiatives are often hard to measure and roles aren’t customer-facing, removing a marketing lead is a quick and easy lever for a founder to pull at the first signs of things not working out.
As a result, a self-fulfilling prophecy develops, where marketers assume they’ll only last a year and start making decisions based on that belief. Knowing time is limited, they get over-ambitious and move too fast or focus on things that will pad their resume rather than strategic priorities. After a year or two, they’re off to another company and the startup is back at square one.
This is bad for startups! Scarred by their experience dealing with a first head of marketing departure, many founders put off hiring a new lead for a while—sometimes leaving the company even worse off than before the head of marketing joined.
A checklist
To avoid this fate for your company, use the following checklist to determine if you’re ready for a marketing head:
Do you have budget, headcount, and recruiting bandwidth to help a new marketing leader build their team?
Do you have a clear understanding of your growth model and where marketing efforts can uniquely impact growth?
Do you have buy-in from engineering and design leadership to support marketing experiments and campaigns?
Do you have the patience to allow time for experimentation and some fails before big wins?
If you answer “yes” to (most of) these questions, congratulations—you’re ready to hire your first marketing head. Good luck!