Last week, we discussed how marketing teams differ depending on the growth stage. This week, I thought we’d explore how the ideal VP of Marketing evolves from startup (<100 people) to scale-up (200+ people).
“Layering”—when the organization hires a new “head of” the department in-between you and your current boss—is quite common. Advisors will tell CEOs that “you’ve outgrown this leader” and that to get to the next level, it’s your duty to bring in next-level talent. For us, the leaders, layering can feel brutal—we get our sense of identity from our work, and being layered signals we couldn’t do the job.
It’s not always bad: When Clint Schmidt joined Bloc as the new COO of Bloc, adding a layer between me and my CEO, I might have lost some clout, but I also reaped benefits: I gained a someone I could learn from, it increased the likelihood the company might succeed, and Clint continued being my mentor long after the company was acquired.
The best-case scenario is that as the startup scales up, you’ll scale up with the business, and you’ll deliver at that next level — negating any reason to bring in an outsider. That’s why I’m sharing what I’ve learned about the type of VP of Marketing you need (or you have to be) as your marketing team scales.
VP of Marketing
Startup
First and foremost, A VP of Marketing should have a deep desire to win.
From there, it’s helpful to think about marketing executives falling into 3 buckets:
brand marketers
product marketers
performance marketers
You’re unlikely to get all three, so you want someone who spikes in two. Then we can hire an IC or consultant to round out the third. My personal bias is that performance marketing should always be one of the three. We’ll get into why below.
When to Hire a Brand Marketing VP
At Mirror, a luxury fitness hardware device, branding was essential to the company’s success in a far more profound way than it is in B2B SaaS. Founder Brynn Putnam over-indexed on brand expertise early on, working with numerous top-tier branding agencies and hiring a VP of marketing from the beauty industry.
But for most startups, brand is unlikely to be the right focus.
When to Hire a Product Marketing VP
Early on, some argue that you would want to hire a product marketing VP: someone who can uncover customer pain points, package a solution, price it, and tell compelling PR narratives. Julie Supan is the prototypical example of this type of marketing executive—she did the early positioning and PR work for Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, and many others.
The challenge I often see when hiring a product marketer VP is they don’t understand how to build a repeatable growth engine. The only marketing channel they can really drive is PR—and PR is a flash in the pan.
That’s why I typically recommend hiring a consultant like Julie to ensure you have the right product marketing foundation. Pair them with a full-time department head who spikes in performance marketing: someone who can build and drive a repeatable growth engine.
At Coding Dojo, for example, our VP of Marketing Stephen has both a strong quantitative backbone as well as an innate talent for visual design. One of the first and best hires we’ve ever made was Jianna, our first Product Marketing Lead, who rounded out Stephen’s gaps. She has transformed the product marketing function and driven tremendous revenue growth.
Scale-Up
As the business scales, the need for a VP of Marketing with an analytical backbone builds up:
Marketing and Finance need to work together around how new customers translate into recognized revenue
Product and Marketing need to work together around experimentation
Investors want a model for predictable revenue growth and declining customer acquisition costs (CAC)
If that's not you, you have two options. First, you can try to immediately delegate this type of work because you know you can’t do it. This is the type of leader who eventually gets layered. Alternatively, you can find a way to learn what you don’t know, and then choose to delegate it. The two best ways to do this are to bring in teachers and join communities, then hire people better than you.
Bring-In Teachers that Accelerate Your Learning
When I became head of revenue at Bloc, I knew I’d need to learn about sales, sales ops, sales coaching, and sales automation. I found a friend who was a Director of Sales Ops: he helped us define our sales stages and get V1 of our Salesforce instance off the ground. I paid him in scotch.
Eventually we hired Mitch Morando, an experienced VP of Sales and a friend of Clint’s. Mitch would do 1-on-1 coaching sessions with me and group coaching sessions with my sales team. I showed that I didn’t need to know it all—I was capable of learning fast and getting the business to where it needed.
Join Communities that Scale Your Learning
Once we got through the steepest part of the learning curve, I could have tried delegating away the work by hiring a full-time Head of Sales or an experienced Sales Ops Manager. Instead, I continued pushing to learn the craft myself. I joined Modern Sales Pros, started going to all their events, and started reading their listserv voraciously. Eventually we did hire for those roles, but not before I had essentially learned to do most of it myself.
A lot of the time, as a leader, you’re able to find leverage points at the seams between teams. For example the hand-off between demand gen and the SDR team is where a lot of conversion loss happens. A Director of Demand Gen with a surface-level understanding of how SDRs operate will fail in their role. A leader with a detailed understanding of SDRs, hard-won from doing the work, talking to experts, and joining communities, will be set up to take advantage of those opportunities, and will help their demand gen team succeed.
Hire Experts
Here’s where I screwed up. We were scrappy, we had raised a decent-sized round. I could have pushed to invest in a proper Head of Sales or a proper Sales Ops Manager. Instead, I continued to do without filling these roles. I tried promoting from within, very gradually converting a top rep into a player-coach. And I continued cross-training a data analyst, with limited Salesforce experience, to become our Sales Ops Manager.
Meanwhile, the number of ICs reporting to me ballooned, and I didn’t have time to coach up my sales management org, stay ahead of them on my own sales learning, and manage a marketing team well. In retrospect, the moment we raised a round, I should have hired people better than me to cover those areas I was weakest in.
Upskilling to Scale Up
Leading marketing at any business can be hectic, but more so at a startup, when the pressure to drive revenue is at its highest. With marketing leadership roles and responsibilities changing drastically in the last decade, you have to be on your feet, quickly adapting to new skill sets, new tech, and new perspectives to keep meeting your revenue goals.
Having experienced this marketing transformation several times in my career, I know how easy it is to lose track of what you’ll need to succeed in the long run—but you need to keep one eye on these at all times if you want to avoid getting layered. Keep experimenting and upskilling, and make sure you know what your role truly requires.
Good luck!