Building a marketing team from scratch
The early days of marketing at a funded startup
Last year I joined a fast-growing startup called CrowdRiff. There were many things that drew to me this role and this company — the founders, the people, the product, the industry.
Equally enticing was the prospect of helping to build something.
There is so much already written about marketing tactics, but not so much around marketing leadership, specifically the aspect of figuring out what kind of team you need and who you should hire for those roles.
This is not my first time running marketing at a startup, but I‘ve never taken the time to document what it’s like and what I’m learning. I’m curious to know what others in similar size/stage companies are doing, and share notes.
Months 0–3
When I first joined CrowdRiff we had raised a substantial seed round of funding and already had many happy customers. We also had only one full time marketing person who was wearing many hats — content creation, event marketing, inbound marketing.
My focus for the first 3 months was as follows:
Focus area #1: Develop a good understanding of our customer and prospects
It’s so tempting to just jump into the weeds of particular marketing tactics but I’ve always found that investing a little bit of time and effort up front to really understand your buyer saves you a lot of money and effort downstream.
In fact, this goal underpins everything we do as a marketing team. Without understanding our customers (and prospects) — how they buy, how they view our space and our company, what they really look for, what sources they turn to for information, who influences them — we’d essentially be trying tactics through trial and error and hoping something would stick.
This is especially helpful when you are doing B2B marketing where there are multiple buyers and complex sales cycles.
Key inputs:
- Sitting in on sales calls
- Spending time with the sales team
- Speaking/emailing with customers directly
- Following customers, prospects and influencers on social media, paying attention to what they talk about, what events they go to and what kind of information they share or discuss.
Key artifact(s):
- Persona or Jobs-To-Be-Done documents (when I say document, take this with a grain of salt — it can be as simple as some bulleted points in a Google doc, or a beautiful designed piece that you can print and post somewhere visible to your team)
Focus area #2: Put together a high level plan of where we should focus our marketing efforts
Planning is a four letter word at most early stage startups. I think it’s because it implies something that is static and rigid. Also, at startups you don’t have the luxury of time. Planning can feel like an indulgent activity that takes time away from executing.
On the other hand, not doing any planning at all is like getting into a car and driving without stopping to think if you going in the direction of your destination.
The happy compromise I’ve made is to put together a plan that is high level — it is a handful of slides or a 1 page bulleted document that highlights some key assumptions and areas of focus.
A high level plan is also a useful way to share information with the rest of the leadership team, and other departments. Having something tangible to discuss can identify gaps or misalignment between teams.
This helped me enormously in terms of making it clear where we should focus our efforts and what kind of skills we’d need on the marketing team.
In my case I created a first version of this plan about 4–6 weeks into starting my role, and it took 2–3 rounds of iteration before I landed on something that made sense. All together it probably took me less than one week of total effort over the course of my first 3 months.
Key activities:
- Talking with existing team members about what has worked or not worked in the past
- Analyzing the inputs from the activities of goal #1
- Determining our available resources (budget) and skills (people)
Key outputs:
Summary slide deck of the marketing plan, including:
- Assumptions about our buyers — who they are, how we can reach them, how they buy, who influences them
- Key areas of focus
- Key tactics
- Desired impact and timeframe
- Key roles and budget requirements
Focus area #3: Develop a system to measure marketing results
When you are building marketing from scratch, there is little actual data to draw from. So a critical job of any marketing leader is to make sure that there is some way to measure the results of our team’s efforts.
This is easier said than done!
To start off with, you have to determine what you want to measure and to what degree.
In our case we decided to use a last touch attribution methodology by lead source and sublead source, i.e. what was the most recent trackable interaction that led to that lead coming into our pipeline (e.g. Advertising) and which source within that channel did it come from (e.g. Facebook ad).
There are limitations to this approach but I decided it was a limitation we could live with at this stage of our business and team size.
We also track marketing contribution along the entire funnel, from leads to demos to deals and revenue, so we don’t fall into the common marketing trap of only focusing on lead generation without measuring if those leads actually resulted in revenue.
Next you have to implement the tools to track the key results you are measuring.
On the plus side there is more marketing technology available than every before. The downside is that the amount of choice and the complexity of making all your tools work together is much higher than it’s ever been.
In the end we are using a combination of our CRM, Marketing Automation Tool and good old spreadsheets to get the data we are looking for.
Key activities
- Configuring our CRM
- Migrating to a new marketing automation platform
- Conversations with sales leadership
Key outputs:
- Marketing and sales dashboards (combination of our CRM and spreadsheets)
What I’ve learned so far
Looking back at my first 3 months at CrowdRiff, I’ve learned a few things:
Taking the time to document certain things is essential as the marketing team grows. There were some things I took some shortcuts on initially — e.g. how I documented our target personas and their “jobs to be done”. As new team members have come on board it’s been essential to have all of this material available in an easy to reference format, to shorten the ramp up time.
Everyone in marketing needs to regularly interact with our customers. Whenever someone new joins CrowdRiff’s marketing team, they sit in on sales calls and customer onboarding calls to hear first hand from our prospects and customers. I’ve realized that it can’t just stop after their first month. All of us in marketing need to regularly be talking with our sales team and continuing to spend time hearing from customers directly. Our industry moves fast and we need to be constantly checking our assumptions, testing our messaging, receiving feedback on our work. Doing this has helped us enormously.
True sales and marketing alignment takes work and a bit of luck. Sales and marketing alignment is the holy grail of SaaS companies. Everyone wants it but it rarely seems to exist.
Mark, our Head of Sales, happens to value marketing and truly works with me in partnership to achieve common goals. By agreeing together on what matters to our company and how we can best track it, we have eliminated the typical friction that exists between our departments.
What does this mean in reality? For one, we share dashboards on our performance so there is no arguing over how many leads we produced or how many new customers came through marketing initiatives. It also helps that he and I sit 3 feet away from each other and socialize together; setting an example for our teams who also work really well together.
I know that this is not the case in most companies and I don’t really have a solution for making this work at your startup. One thing that helped me was I spent a lot of time with Mark before I decided to join CrowdRiff. If our personalities and approaches hadn’t gelled, perhaps I wouldn’t have taken the job.
What’s next
My next 3 months at CrowdRiff were focused on adding specialization to my team and ramping up on key focus areas. I’ll share more soon; in the meantime happy to answer any questions or hear from others who are in a similar role.
