How to hire your first head of marketing

What should your first marketing hire do?

First marketing hires often end up as five roles in one, but the five are never equally important. Kimberly Whitler and Neil Morgan, marketing professors at the University of Virginia and Indiana University, found the same gap at the top: only 2% of the CMO job descriptions they studied clearly spelled out what the job expected.

“Grow the business and generate leads” is too broad to hire for. Every marketer should come in with that goal. What differs is how they’d go after it: a content marketer writes, a growth marketer runs ads, and each one makes their strength the priority. Sometimes that strength doesn’t fit the business at all. A company can hire someone to run ads and SEO and find out that nobody searches for what it sells.

So before writing the job description, ask which needle has to move for the business to move. The answer should be their primary mission for the first 6 months or so. For example:

• get pipeline coming in beyond the founder’s network
• launch a product into a new segment
• give sales a message and materials that win against your main competitor
• rebuild marketing after a pivot, or after a hire that didn’t work out

Whatever you pick, one person should be able to own it.

Every senior marketer has a specialty

A good senior marketer is what marketers call T-shaped: able to work across every area, and deep in one. That deep part is their specialty, sometimes called their spike. Dave Kellogg, former CMO of Business Objects, observes that most CMOs grow up in one part of marketing, and that “virtually no one grew up in both” product marketing and demand generation.

A marketing director, or a CMO in a bigger company, is responsible for both the strategy and the execution. They’ve run marketing, not just one part of it. They also know what each part needs from the others: the message feeds content and sales, content feeds the channels, and the channels feed pipeline. So when pipeline stalls, they know which part to fix first. In a first hire, the people they manage are often agencies and freelancers before they’re a team.

Product marketing. Product marketers know how buyers decide and how to play against competitors. They position the company against the alternatives and give sales the story to tell. They don’t need to know your buyer on day one, but the good ones bring references that carry over. Someone who learned to sell into fintech, with its compliance reviews and cautious buyers, gets up to speed in healthcare faster.

Demand and growth. Ask a demand marketer what a qualified meeting costs in each channel, or how many meetings it takes to close a deal, and they’ll have a number. They know how channels work and how one feeds another, like content building the audience your ads reach later.

Content, brand and comms. These marketers have an ear for writing, or an eye for how look and feel shape what people think of a company, and often both. They know which format fits which goal: a guide to be found in search, a case study to help close a deal, a founder’s post to get known.

Ops and systems. An ops marketer is the first to notice when the CRM numbers don’t add up, or where leads get lost between marketing and sales.

Their specialty matters because your first head of marketing builds your marketing operating system, how the function runs. It needs to be built around what your go-to-market motion depends on: steady content production and distribution if buyers find you through search, or a close read of your customers if you sell to buying committees.

Match their profile to your situation

Where a marketer has worked tells you whether their specialty will carry over to your company. Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days, shows that each situation a leader walks into asks for something different. For a first head of marketing, the question is what mission they need to accomplish within six months.

Starter. If marketing today is you, a couple of salespeople and a website you’d rather not look at, you’re looking for a starter. They’ve walked into that kind of company before and built marketing from nothing: talking to customers, finding the words that make buyers get the problem the product solves, testing channels until one brings in meetings. Alex Kracov, Lattice’s first marketing hire, calls this the real test of a first marketer: can they do the work on their own laptop, or do they need to hire people to do it?

Builder. A builder is someone who has worked with small marketing teams and taken them to the next level. They tend to join to accomplish a major marketing initiative the company hasn’t done before, like a structured product launch or a new customer segment, and they often hire the first specialists to get it done.

Runner. On a résumé, runners show up in two ways. One is a run of big logos: they built their experience in established companies where the machine was already in place, and the job was to make it work better. Their comfort zone is usually a setting where people and budget are plentiful. The other is quieter: years as the only marketer at a smaller company that grew slowly, far from the pace of most B2B tech companies, writing the communications, coordinating freelancers and making the sales collateral. Both are good at execution. What they’ve done less of is decide what marketing should be doing in the first place.

Fixer. When there’s doubt about marketing’s ability to contribute to growth after several attempts that didn’t work, what you need might be a fixer. Fixers have come in after a pivot, an acquisition or a false start, and their first job is to make the calls: which agency to keep, which channels to pause, which tools to drop and whether the old message still holds. Only then do they add anything new.

Do you need a CMO or a marketing director?

Two things tell you the level better than a title: how many times they’ve carried out the mission you need, and who they’ll work with on your leadership team. A VP at a 30-person startup and a director at a 3,000-person company can have very different experience behind the same line on a résumé.

Count the reps

A rep is one time they carried a mission from start to finish and owned the result. Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, tests whether they “had the ball,” as in they carried the work themselves, not just whether they were nearby when it happened. One rep can come down to luck or a good setup. Two or three show something they can repeat, though years of the same job in the same kind of company can bring habits that don’t carry over.

Reps also tell you the level. A manager has carried out missions someone else designed. A director has designed them and run them. A CMO has decided, with the rest of the leadership team, which missions marketing takes on in the first place. A CMO from a large company brings years of that judgment. What they’re often out of practice with is doing the work themselves, and in a company with no marketing team, they’d have to.

Match the level to your leadership team

Look at who they’ll work with.

• Will they own a revenue number? If marketing owns revenue with sales, or over it, hire at the level of your head of sales. If marketing supports sales, a director fits.
• Who will their peers be? A marketer who’s junior to everyone else at the table won’t hold their own in planning.

Elad Gil, author of High Growth Handbook, has a rule for executive hires that helps here: hire for the next 12 to 18 months. For most first heads of marketing, that means a director. A CMO or VP fits once a team already produces results and needs someone to lead it.

Is a fractional CMO a viable option?

You can hire a full-time director, or bring in a fractional CMO: an experienced marketing leader who works with you one or two days a week. Good ones bring several starter and builder reps and references from many industries. They can also help you define the mission before you hire for it.

It’s the wrong fit when you need someone there every day and nobody can do the work between visits. Once marketing produces repeatable results, the question becomes who’s going to keep doing it, and that’s when a full-time hire makes sense.

Cheatsheet: how to read a marketer’s résumé

I’m always happy to talk with founders who’d rather get this hire right than fill the seat fast. Whether a fractional CMO looks like your best option, or you want a second opinion on the profile you need to hire, tell me what you’re working with.