“So, You Want To Hire a Marketing Head…” Part I
“I need a new marketing head” — CEO
“Why do you need one?” — Me
“We need more leads for the salesforce” — CEO
“So what kind of person are you looking for” — Me
“Someone who can produce leads” — CEO
“Ok…let’s reverse engineer that a bit…” — Me
As a veteran go-to-market executive and recent venture capitalist with Icon Ventures, I’ve had the opportunity to advise the CEO’s of many companies, at various stages of growth on team building — particularly when it comes to hiring their marketing head. Sometimes it’s their first marketing head, but more often, it’s a replacement or over-hire.
From what I’ve seen, the state of the art in specifying the role and running the process is fairly poor. So, based on my experiences and observations, I thought I’d write a short series of blog posts outlining what I think is a better framing and process. In this first post, I’ll try to outline the dimensions of the problem (with data!)
To start with, a root causes of the difficulty hiring a marketing head is that marketing is one of the least well-specified functions. Depending on company stage, the customer base, the distribution strategy and your existing team — your ideal marketing head will vary wildly. In one company, marketing might need to open new markets, define new product categories and execute on world-class customer onboarding. For another company, a marketing head might just need to optimize a lead generation program mix that’s basically working.
Many CEO’s (particularly first time CEO’s who come from a sales or engineering background) can’t articulate exactly what they expect from a marketing head. As a result, it’s not surprising that marketing executives have the shortest tenure of any startup exec team role, that there seems to be a record number of marketing VP executive searches open for startups, or that CEOs all too often name their marketing head as the role they’d most like to upgrade.
Why is this? After all, for the most part, Silicon Valley has developed good tribal knowledge of how to evaluate and select heads of engineering, sales, finance, HR, services and support. Why do marketing heads have such short tenures?
And just to be clear, marketing head tenures are significantly shorter than others, even in companies growing successfully. To illustrate, I took a dive into LinkedIN and looked at all 35 of the B2B Unicorns (as defined by CBInsights), measuring the job tenure of their CEO’s, heads of engineering and heads of marketing. Here’s what I found:
As you can see from the data, two-thirds of marketing heads have been at their companies for less than 2 years. In fact, the median tenure of a marketing head in a B2B unicorn was only 1.75 years, vs. 6.1 years for a CEO and 2.6 years for a head of engineering. Only 1 in 10 marketing heads had been with their company for more than 4 years.
So why do marketing executives turn over so quickly? In my experience, it’s usually one of these three reasons:
- The CEO did a poor job hiring the right marketing head for the company’s needs, and they’re failing in the role vs. the CEO’s expectations
- The marketing role changed as the company scaled and the person who had been performing acceptably is having trouble adapting to new needs
- Growth is faltering, and the marketing head isn’t able to offer a compelling diagnosis and/or get well strategy
Now, there’s not much to be done in case 2 or 3 — the CEO needs to replace the marketing head (although sometimes splitting roles can work.) But in this blog series, I’ll focus on case 1: how the CEO can improve how they specify and hire for the role. Next up, I’ll frame out the job spec of a startup marketing head and talk a little about how I think that’s changing, particularly for B2B marketing.
..Michael Mullany
