(Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash)

Navigating hiring tradeoffs

We’ve spent a lot of words in this series talking about understanding and operating marketing functions, but almost none on people. The common challenges with startup marketing [and sales!] hiring look something like this:

No go to market strategy →No scope for a role, which looks the same as too much scope for a role →No sense of the kind of person to look for →No clarity in job descriptions or in direction to recruiters →No standards by which to evaluate candidates that connect to actual business goals

In this post, we’ll talk through what it takes to hire the right-est marketer for your company in your market serving your users and customers.

Programming notes: this post is n in a series of indeterminate length on GTM topics mainly for startup people, mainly leadership, mainly coming from non-GTM backgrounds. There’s a list at the end.

Marketers go to market

All marketing exists within some go to market [GTM]. What are you selling? Who is going to use it? How will it make their lives better? Who are you selling to? What industry are you selling in to? What is your intended sales motion? Who are your competitors? What will your funnel look like? Is it low-cost-entry, bottoms-up, land-and-expand or is it open-source, community, usage-growth, commercial-support or is it..?

If you don’t have answers to these questions, you haven’t gotten to the part of building a company where you actually go to market. And you really should not be looking for a marketer unless you have a ton of money and are hiring execs before you launch OR you’re very clear about finding someone who can help you answer all these questions and then execute on the answers [rare!].

Why? Because the person you hire to come up with or execute a marketing strategy for GTM A will not be the same as for GTM B. The same holds for sales.

Example!

If you’re selling enterprise software into hospital groups that costs $250k a year at its cheapest and takes three months to pilot and get through HIPAA reviews with an additional three months to integrate and successfully onboard a customer with the help of sales engineering or professional services once they’ve signed a contract — you will have a very different marketing strategy (and tactics) compared to a freemium product for ISRs selling into unregulated industries with initial buy-in for a paid tier of $100 a year with a 14-day free trial and self-onboarding guided by docs and in-app tutorials that takes on average less than 30 days.

Anecdata!

Notice how much turnover there is in sales and marketing at startups: early when they are trying to figure out product market fit, later when they’re trying to figure out go to market fit, later when they pivot the product or the GTM or at different stages of growth ($0–5M, $5–20M, $20–50M, $50–100M, $100Ms).

Whenever there’s a material change in GTM, Marketing and Sales have to be reworked.

Marketing and Sales people, for better or worse, tend to be single track operators and are not effective across different go to market models and industries.*

*Note: This is definitely not true for all sales and marketing professionals. But it is true often enough that crossing boundaries, like going from B2B → D2C, is extremely difficult for sales and marketing professionals. It can be easier to change careers altogether than to get someone to give you an opportunity to do that.

Define the role

Do you want one marketer who will design, builds, and maintain a static website using Github and Hugo while designing a logo and visual identity and figuring out how what your demand get strategy is while running email campaigns out of mailchimp and traveling to events every month to give talks or run your booth while developing your product messaging and helping sales position the product against customers while researching keyword inventory and running search ad experiments while writing press releases and building relationships with tech journalists while interviewing customers for case studies and some other things too?

This is not a thing. You might find someone who will do all of this for you, at least half of it poorly, and burn them out in short order. But you won’t be happy. Neither will they.

In the words of Arielle Jackson:

Most marketers who aren’t new to the field specialize in either the so-called “soft” or “hard” sides of marketing, focusing more on brand and communications or growth, analytics, and channel optimization. “Even CMO-level candidates typically tilt more heavily in one direction,” she says. “I’m not sure where this desire to have it all in one package comes from — you wouldn’t expect an engineer to be amazing at front-end and back-end, but unfortunately this expectation exists for marketers.”

So you have to decide which things are more important to do most well for this role right now: product marketing, demand gen, pr/comms, or brand. At an early or pre-growth startup, say <100 people and pre-C, the answer to this is almost Product Marketing or Demand Gen.

From First Round’s: So You Think You’re Ready to Hire a Marketer? Read This First.

Know your GTM

B2B enterprise SaaS product with an inbound events-driven funnel and land-and-expand inside sales?
D2C high-end design-forward travel gear with an inbound social-media-and-influencer-driven funnel and self-service sales?
Three-sided marketplace connecting chefs to kitchen-having-venues to private-party-holding-people with an inbound SEM-and-brand-sponsorship-and-referral-driven funnel and inside sales?
B2B IoT sensor-and-SaaS package for civil engineering with an outbound relationaship-based-rolodex-calling funnel and top-down-whale-hunting field sales?

This is key for recruiters, for your network, and for putting at the top of your job description.

Stack rank the functional work

Organize what you think they will have to tackle by immediateness and impact and then write it out.

Is growth of usage for your free tier more important than revenue?
Is brand recognition more important than usage?
Is getting into a magic quadrant more important than technical blog content?

Example!

Campaign Strategy and Execution: Develop, this coordinate, and drive execution of demand gen campaigns with a focus on SEM, social ads, and influencer marketing
Operations: Select and build out the marketing stack, develop reporting to evaluate the performance of marketing activities
Leadership: Recruit and hire a marketing team to run growth

Advice!

Any set of priorities has a half-life. Typically, your primary goal is to hire someone who will get you from PointA, where you are right now, to Point B, whatever the next big business milestone is — for example from 0 to $5M in ARR.

You’ll look for someone who’s done that and also the next stage of growth after that in the same or a similar GTM context. The danger with this person will be that they will simply repeat what they did at their last job at your company without employing any critical thinking or consideration of the specific challenges with your specific GTM.

More Advice!

Make sure everyone who’s screening or interviewing candidates totally understands the jobs to be done and weights a candidate’s attributes and abilities proportionally. Passing over a great candidate just because they don’t have experience in a low priority skill for the role for now is an unnecessary mistake.

Figure out the non-functional work

Now that you know what the person needs to functionally do in the role, what do they need to be able to do that on your team?

Is this an individual contributor [IC] or manager or manager of managers role? Is it a combination of IC and management?
Will the role start at one level of contribution but transition to another in the expected future?
Will this person set strategic direction, decide on the tactics, create all the plans, and also run/do all the execution.. or some subset of that?
Do they need to hire and build a team? If so, what’s your ethos about management styles and team structure and what are you expectations for a new manager to conform to those?
How involved do you want to be in managing this person? Will you set direction and leave them to their own devices or do you want to be intimately involved in the details at the functional strategic or tactical level?
Is this person an exec? Will they be in board meetings? Will they be expected to collaborate, and tangle, with execs?
Are there existing ICs or managers that will report in to this person?
Who will they work most closely with? What are the personalities and work styles involved? What’s the right kind of complementary style? Do you intentionally want to introduce someone into the mix to shake things up or cause a little hopefully productive friction?
Will this person be external facing? Will they need to interact with leads, customers, partners, press, analysts, or investors?
Will they be developing and giving talks at meetups, conferences, and other events?
Will they need to interact with or manage contractors?
Will they be expected to travel?
Will they be expected to be in the office every day?

Just like your functional requirements, these too have to be stack ranked and clearly articulated both internally and to recruiters. Most of these things will never make it into a job description, but the ones that will help someone self-select should. That includes: details about seniority and management, expectations about being external facing, and travel vs distributed vs office time.

Looking for good people

You want a person who has some experience in your sector with a company at your stage and maybe the next one, who can competently and effectively execute against the top items in your stack ranked priorities for the role while meeting the non-functional requirements you think are necessary for success in your specific go to market with your specific challenges.

It’s highly unlikely that such a person exists and that you can afford them and that they will work for you.

So, trade offs. Be very explicit about which items on the list are absolutely necessary, which are highly desirable, and which are only nice-to-haves. Make sure everyone in the hiring process knows.

Advice on seniority tradeoffs!

The more junior the role, the less experience and record-of-previous-work you will have to go on. Which means more weight has to be given on how fast they’ll climb the learning curve, how well they might perform, and how well they can grow to be successful in your particular environment.

Advice on recruiters!

If you’re working with recruiters who don’t ask you the details of your needs and priorities and acceptable tradeoffs for a role, those recruiters will not find you the people you need. Recruiters who do dig in are generally expensive.

Write good job descriptions

A job description should have everything a candidate need to self-select in or out of talking to you about the role. Look at it the same way you do copy on your website or in ads or on the side of a bus. It’s part of your top of funnel and you want qualified leads who are good fits for the role and your team to self-select in.

What’s the job?
What’s the essence of the company, product, and market?
What value will the role deliver to the company?
What value will the company deliver to the person in the role?
What are the expectations and requirements?
Which things are deal breakers and which aren’t?
What kinds of people will be successful?
Where is it located?

If you’re hearing from or receiving candidates that are all wrong, the problem is with your job description, your choice of recruiters, or how you’ve trained recruiters on the role. In other words, it’s your fault.

Understand the language of marketing seniority

Marketing roles and responsibilities vary quite a bit as companies get grow and deep specialists become more highly valued over generalists. Here’s a very basic ladder in a template that you can copy and modify for your company.

On “Assignments”

If you’re asking anyone to do material work that you might put to use, pay them for it. Otherwise, everything should be doable within the context of an interview or interview time.

Examples!

Put up a website or walk through some slides in a pitch deck and ask them to reverse engineer the messaging, personas, and GTM strategy
Ask them to critique a product page on a competitors website
Ask them what their favorite app or product is, then to sketch out a cold outbound email to a prospect pitching it
Have them rough out a social media plan for a new feature launch
Have them rough out a product launch timeline
Sketch out a funnel with volumes and conversion rates with a clear problem, then ask how they would go about debugging the funnel

Interview by being interviewed

The more senior the role, the more likely it is that you are being interviewed and not the other way around. The kinds of questions the candidate asks and what they choose to dig into are strong indicators about how they approach the role and where their interests or expertise lie.

Examples!

These are the lines of inquiry I expect from senior roles:

What does your funnel look like today? What do you want it to look like? The more detail they dig into the better.
Who do you position against in your marketing? Who do you compete against in real life?
They should ask about some key metrics like lead volumes, sales cycles, ACVs, CAC
They should ask about lead sources and channels, what’s known to work and not work so far
They should ask about the sales motion and model, better if they ask you to be specific like is it inside or outside, land-and-expand or big deals on day one, small teams or entire departments, etc
What are you go to market gaps, or what risks do you see on achieving the business results you want?
What do you want this role to accomplish in year one?
What’s the structure of the marketing team today?
What’s the structure of the sales team today? How is that expected to change over the next year?
What’s the runway/burn? When are you going out to raise again? What do you need to show in order to raise and what’s the gap between today and that?
What are the keys to success for this role?
What are the risks, or what would cause someone to fail?

Final Notes

The things I’m looking for in any hire are:

Do they have the chops or can they learn on the job fast enough
Can they think about all the parts of the work and how it intersects with other teams
Can they bring structure or do they need to be provided structure, and how much
Are they able to condense, explain, and talk about things in the forms necessary to effectively communicate to different audiences and drive a desired action

What is the mix of experience, competence, potential, and management overhead?

And finally, specifically for external facing roles: how well can they work a room and be an effective communicator in person or to an audience?

Posts in this series (and templates)

Reading List and Resources

Hackernoon Archive June 2nd, 2019

Java-C-Assembly Matryoshka

@krossovochkinVasya Drobushkov

WOMEN IN BLOCKCHAIN | EDUCATION BREEDS CONFIDENCE

@morne-olivierMorne Olivier

Marketing 302 for Engineers: Hiring Marketers

@aneelAneel