Hiring Your First Marketing Leader: Easy button, or no?

“Did you hear (High-Growth Startup)’s CMO is out?” 

For those of us in marketing, we’ve all heard colleagues pontificate over the quick departures of marketing executives. The scenario where a new leader is brought on board to drive massive growth only to be out the door a year later is not uncommon. To boot, these are often terrific marketers with strong track records. So what is it that makes this role a revolving door? 

While every situation is different, there’s a common thread among the mentality founders hold about the role of marketing. The thinking goes: Startups 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 leader to start a department from scratch while everyone’s at 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. These marketers weren’t all “bad.” Most of them have stellar reputations, in fact. So what’s really going on?

In Silicon Valley, marketing isn’t important—until it is

When building startups, we often disregard marketing for as long as possible, convincing ourselves it’s “fluff” – a nice-to-have. 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’s got 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; info isn’t flowing between customers and product teams; taking turns managing the company’s X account isn’t working; and founders have to manage the press alias. At the same time, the internal demand for marketing grows because after all, marketing is also an enablement function; it helps other teams be more successful.

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 hiring their first head of marketing, founders often boast, “Look how far we’ve come – without a penny spent on marketing!” But this is like saying, “Look how great my teeth look – without ever brushing! Want to be my first dentist?” If you’ve dismissed marketing for years, it’s unlikely a new hire will change your mindset. Experienced marketers know this. A seasoned candidate understands they’ll be defining marketing’s role, educating the team, helping other departments succeed, scaling the brand, and telling its story all while juggling day-to-day tasks they’ve long delegated. Starting from scratch with no resources is a tough sell. 

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. 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.

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.

If you’re already at this point and suspect you’re in need of a more senior marketing hire to take your growth to the next level, ask yourself these questions to get in tune with if you’re really ready for this investment in not just hiring but helping a marketing leader succeed. 

• Do you have a 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, you’re ready to hire your first marketing head. And guess what? Explaining your answers to those questions will do you a heck of a lot of good in demonstrating to candidates that you’ve really thought this through and are ready to advocate for their function within your company.

Helen is a Venture Partner at True and a seasoned marketing leader, having driven growth at AngelList, Plaid, Quora, Dropbox, and Facebook. When not helping founders build iconic brands, she’s cheering on the Buffalo Bills or admiring the goop brand. Once you’re backed by True, Helen’s one of the many experts in your corner.