The Startup CMO’s First 100 Days: Advice on Building and Managing a Team (Part 3)

When a company has reached the level of growth where they need to hire a CMO, there will be a lot of day-to-day marketing work. Whom you hire to do this work is a crucial factor of your success. Your job as CMO is to create an environment where smart people tackle parts of a bigger plan, and you compile it in a unified strategy. So, you must hire great people, give them responsibility, and support them.

Many first-time CMOs fall down by trying to do too much of the day-to-day work themselves because they are not yet comfortable with delegation. Yes, there will always be the “rolling-up-your-sleeves” part of your day when working at a startup. In fact, I still write some of our promotional emails for our TopResume brand, and conduct much of our analysis. I mock up our funnels and wireframe our CTAs. Doing some of the tactical work is a given at a startup. But, you simply cannot win without a team of great people, working in unison. Let’s look at how to build that team.

This is part three of a five-part series. If you’d like to review part one , you can review it here: The Startup CMO’s First 100 Days: Advice on Where to Start (Part 1). Also, you can check out Advice on Developing Relationships (Part 2).

Marketing Organization Models

Coming in, you will already have some ideas about the team you need, which is usually based on what you have done before. If you don’t know where to start, here’s a great article from Tom Tunguz on how Bill Macaitis builds a SaaS marketing team. Bill is the former CMO of ZenDesk and the current CMO of Slack. He is a startup marketing legend and his nine disciplines are spot-on.

Hubspot also has published content on building a marketing team. Their CMO’s Guide to Marketing Org Structures provides a few examples of how you may consider structuring your team. They also crafted a good article that considers the size of the team you need.

Every situation is different so it’s hard to make a specific recommendation on the exact team structure that will work will for you, but these articles are great places to start. Given your experience and research, you should begin to develop an organizational chart and begin hiring early. However, keep in mind that, as you learn more, you will need to adjust the plan to account for the organization’s strengths and weaknesses.

Newbies or Experienced Pros?

After you determine the roles you need for your team, your next critical decision is how much experience you are seeking. All things being equal, you will want someone with experience. But, not all things are equal, namely salaries. You may not be able to afford a team of veterans. Also, you should not discount greener candidates because they often bring enthusiasm, passion, and ambition that is infectious. Personally, I like to have at least one or two hungry junior-level members balance out my team. But, in the director-level roles, I look for experience first. There’s no substitute for it and it gets you up-and-running faster.

What To Do When Inheriting Employees

It is common for new marketing leaders at a startup to inherit an employee that was hired before your arrival. That’s great. You can leverage this situation to ease your transition into the organization. Chances are the person — if he or she is more junior, as they tend to be in startups — wants to impress. You have a mutually beneficial interest. They can help you become oriented and get buy-in from the heart of the organization.

For example, at one company I inherited two junior-level team members. My CEO gave me the power to replace them if I saw fit. However, they were both young, smart, raw, and absolute workhorses. Additionally, everyone in the company loved them. It was a no-brainer to keep them and leverage their popularity. It took effort to shape them because they were so raw. But it was worth it because they had talent. Today, they are both successful and sophisticated marketers. I take a pride in that. I provided them a path and growth tasks. In return, they worked their hardest and helped me become accepted by the organization. This situation fast-tracked my initiatives immensely.

But, I didn’t rely solely on them; I then hired a few more seasoned people to round out the team. Within months, we were a well-oiled machine — the experienced pros leading the strategy and the smart newbies driving the passion and effort.

Paying Market Rates

All that said, you will be unable to attract experienced people if you do not pay market rates. You will have to set the tone early with your CEO that you are going for high-caliber employees and the way to do this is to get buy-in during the interview process. If you make the case that experience will generate traction faster, you have a better chance at getting approval. You should also be willing to stick your neck out on this. It’s your plan, your budget, and your job on the line. Explain to your CEO that you don’t want to have an excuse if things don’t work out. You are taking responsibility. Great CEOs love that “all-in” attitude.

Research has shown that salaries do not necessarily make people love their jobs, but they can make them hate it if they feel underpaid and undervalued. Basically, you have to pay market rates and treat people well in order to have a high-performing team; you have no shot if you lowball them. Take a stand here.

Staffing Appropriately

In addition to paying well, you need to have the right amount of coverage. New marketing leaders tend to understaff because they are afraid to walk into a new company that may have previously been conservative with marketing spend, and start throwing money around.

I understand that mentality, especially if it’s your first time as an executive. However, it’s really hard to succeed without the proper resources. Even if your product is great and has built-in virality, someone needs to create the graphics, place the ads, manage social media, write content, etc. Doing this on no budget is a recipe for failure.

Marketing is a lot of work. There are countless moving parts, much of which is minutiae. But, the great work happens when people have clear minds and time to think through problems. You simply cannot have a small staff that is barely keeping their heads above water and expect them to excel when they will be solely focused on completing the basics. Take a stand on this point as well.

Your Hiring Plans Can Uncover Red Flags

Since you are setting these expectations during the interview process, you can determine the organization’s true commitment to providing resources. Don’t take a job unless you have commitment to staff appropriately. Don’t win a job because you sell yourself as some magician who can meet the CFO’s unrealistic budget for you. Instead, sell your CEO on the value of having ample staff performing the right tasks. If you can’t do that, you aren’t actually doing your job right, no matter how hard you work. You aren’t leading.

For example, I received the right type of support from Jeff Berger, Talent Inc.’s CEO and founder. During the interview process, I shared the size of the staff I’d need, along with an understanding of what the budget would look like; there were no surprises down the road. He empowered me to take ownership. There are and were no excuses. He gave me what I wanted. Now I have to deliver and I’m excited about that.

There may be an exception to the rule of walking away; if you don’t think you’ll have another good shot at the big job. In that case, you don’t really hold the negotiating power and may have to accept the short-staffed scenario, if you really want the job. I’d advise against accepting the role, but it’s understandable if you do. Just know what you are getting into and how hard it will be to make it work without the resources.

Manage by First-Principle Thinking

Finally, even if you have the green light to build your ideal team, you can still jeopardize it by mismanaging their focus. I believe the teams that win are the ones that focus only on the work that truly matters, and are able to strip away the distracting work that doesn’t. The book, The One Thing, encapsulates this philosophy.

An even better read is this brilliant study on what makes Elon Musk so successful from the blog Wait but Why. It’s a five-part series culminating in this post The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce. It’s one of the best pieces I have ever read, but the core takeaway for this article is to focus on first principles.

First principles require breaking down a problem into its simplest components and then building a strategy based on simple logic and reasoning. Here is a video of Elon Musk himself speaking about first principles.

That’s why strategic imperatives we covered in part one are so important. They are your first principles stated as goals. If you define them properly, you can assess whether the team is focusing too much on “busy work” and course-correct as needed.

But even more importantly, there is a lesson to be learned in applying first principles in managing your team. What are the core principles you need to win your market? What does the customer really care about? What is going to move the needle? Spend time thinking about that and then strip away everything else from your team. The work that really matters should be prioritized above the rest.

In summary, you need to pick an organizational model, staff it appropriately, attract the right talent by paying and treating them well, and fiercely protect them to ensure they are working on the first principle tasks that will actually make a difference. Managing a team is never easy. You are dealing with humans who have problems from time to time and can be ruled by emotion. How you approach building that team will go a long way to determining how successful that team will be.

I hope this advice serves you well. In the next installment we will talk about conducting the research and analysis you need to begin crafting your marketing plan. Be sure to follow me here on Medium for a notification when it goes live next week. And once again, here are links to part one and part two if you would like to check them out.

Diego Lomanto is the Chief Marketing Officer at Talent Inc., the leading career advice and resume-writing service for job seekers. He is also the co-founder of TournamentPokerEdge.com, the world’s most popular tournament poker training site.