Hiring Cheat Sheet: What to Look for in Your Heads of Demand Gen, Marketing Ops, Sales, and SEO
Two weeks ago, we looked at what your marketing team should look like at every stage and last week we explored what you’ll need to be a great VP of marketing. But if you’re the VP of Marketing, who do you hire next? And how do you ensure you hire the right types of folks who not only can solve today’s problems, but can also scale with the business?
You’ve likely heard the concept of the T-shaped role: The person has some breadth (the top of the ‘T’) but also has deep talent and expertise in one area (the stem of the ‘T’). Early on, everyone does everything, so you’re hiring blobs rather than ‘T’s. But as the business scales, roles become more defined. When that happens, you want to know that your early hires had the right T stem, because they’ll be called upon to build out a department, train others, and push the envelope of their area to start operating in a more sophisticated way.
Let’s look at four roles:
Head of Demand Gen - this one is also sometimes called Head of Growth Marketing or Head of Paid Media. It’s typically the person who owns paid channels.
Head of Marketing Ops - this role has a convoluted history, evolving from Email Marketing into Lifecycle Marketing and now into Marketing Ops
Head of Inside Sales - in many organizations, Head of Inside Sales can report into marketing, so its only natural we explore this one
Head of SEO / Inbound - Inbound marketing was a big buzzword a decade ago but now I see them used interchangeably.
Head of Demand Gen / Paid Acquisition
Startup
A good Head of Demand Gen should have deep expertise in either Google or Facebook, and should be a builder who understands how to implement the measurement-plumbing backbone that will underpin all your future efforts.
Measurement is key: If you don’t lay the right foundation for making data-driven decisions, you’ll make decisions off the easy-to-get-to metrics that are ultimately short-sighted. They should understand the plumbing required to pull the needle all the way through from a specific ad group within Google to a lower-funnel conversion event like a contract signing in Salesforce or a user retained to day 60 in your BI tool.
A lot of people say they can do it, but few actually know how to do it.
If a candidate tells you they used to manage 5+ channels at an early stage (i.e. Facebook, Google, Programmatic, and Affiliates), that may be a red flag. A wide variety of channels at an early stage means no depth of expertise.
Instead, look for someone who has spent a significant amount of their experience focused on managing a few channels rigorously.
At this stage, rigorous experimentation and buzzwords like multivariate testing are a nice to have. The mistake I see early-stage startups make is that they think they should experiment on everything. The reality is you only have the bandwidth to run a handful of experiments, so a good leader will be picky. Furthermore, at an early stage in B2B SaaS, you may not even have enough down-funnel conversions to prove statistical significance on experiments.
Scale-Up
As you scale, you should have a data team to clean and maintain the above data plumbing problems, so your Head of Demand Gen should be a key driver of revenue, packaging integrated strategies with product marketing, sales, and marketing ops.
I recently worked with a Head of Demand Gen at a multi-billion-dollar company, and six months into his role he had no idea how the SDR team worked or who lead the team. How can you possibly drive revenue pipeline if you don’t know how the SDR team converts your MQLs into revenue? Unsurprisingly, the company was hitting its lead targets, but revenue had been in decline for 6 months.
You’ll need a person who thinks in terms of integrated revenue plays that combine multiple channels and layers of the funnel. If they propose measuring success on something they fully control, like MQLs or free user signups, that’s a red flag. Instead, you need someone who is comfortable having their performance measured entirely on revenue.
Head of Marketing Ops / Lifecycle Marketing / Email
This role has evolved a lot in the past few years: 10 years ago we might have called this person a Head of Email Marketing, 5 years ago a Head of Lifecycle Marketing, and today it increasingly falls under Marketing Ops.
This is a funky part of the business because it actually combines multiple core talents. The mistake that a lot of startups make is that they hire a generalist lifecycle marketer who is part project manager, part writer, part coder, and part marketing ops. Worse, I see a lot of folks who are neither gifted writers nor analytical thinkers—they’re just project managers. Without a well-cultivated core talent, you’ll never get great results.
Now, let’s separate the four areas of expertise in Marketing Ops and identify what’s needed at a startup vs. at a scale-up.
Startup
Marketing Ops: This used to be a small part of the role, but as martech stacks have become more advanced, martech has evolved from a back-office type function into an offensive weapon. If you’re better than the competition at converting leads into revenue, you can afford to outbid your competition in paid advertising and still break even. At a startup, and at a scale-up, I’d prioritize hiring a strong senior marketing operations or revenue operations person early. I’d split the role into two from the outset: Hire a Director of Revenue Ops who owns the marketing automation “framework” and hire a Senior Content Marketer who owns populating.
Copywriting: Great writing is always important. The mistake folks make is hiring someone whose talent is writing, but expecting them to do all of the above. Instead, hire a great copywriter who works across layers of the funnel and across channels.
Email Coding Skills: Email marketing used to be a very code-heavy role, but modern marketing automation tools have made that far less critical to success. Instead, nowadays you can leverage responsive WYSIWYG editors to build emails with zero code, or hire a firm that will code pixel-perfect emails for $100 a pop. As a result, I think this part of the role is unnecessary to hire for (full-time) at any stage.
Scale-Up
Everything above still holds true at a scale-up. The smartest thing I’ve learned is that as you scale up, you’d want to create systems so teams can collaborate without meetings. Over-resource teams like marketing ops so they can both play a supporting role to enable your other teams, while still being an offensive weapon improving metrics like conversion and retention.
The most common mistake I see teams making here is that nobody has a vision for how marketing ops can be an offensive weapon so they focus on hiring “Hubspot admins” when in actuality they need a Director of Growth Ops.
The most leverage in a funnel is lost at the seams. Or, conversely, the place your CAC will balloon is at the hand-off points between teams. Marketing Ops is the function that is best positioned to fix those hand-offs, but only if the leader has the vision, the mandate, and the team to get it done.
Head of Inside Sales
I see a sales leader’s role as being about improving people, processes, and tools. The mistake I see most sales leaders make is they focus entirely on people, and don’t focus enough on how processes and tools can be strategic weapons.
They work inside the machine rather than working on the machine itself. For example, I recently audited a sales coaching session where this question came up: Is this person an SQL if XYZ edge-case occurs? We discussed it and resolved the question. And then I asked: are edge-cases like this documented anywhere? The sales leader replied, “Oh when stuff like this comes up, I post something in Slack.”
I tried to mask my deep frustration. When we make a decision on our process, we need to write it down. How do you expect people to remember? How do you expect someone who joins the team next week to know? Most importantly: how can other teams depend on the SQL data when its definition is not consistent? Weekly Cost per SQL is a key leading indicator that measures the efficiency of the $250K we’re shoveling out the door in media spend every week. The stakes of SQLs being 10% off are $1M+ every year.
The above was a process example. Here’s a people example. I believe there are four dimensions where a sales leader should be coaching:
Product knowledge
Sales technique
Sales processes
Motivation
Within training, the mistake I see most often is that Directors of Sales see their job as mainly about coaching on motivation and sales techniques.
Startup
This role is measured by their customers’ results, so they should have a good grasp of ops and data. They’ll need to build the backbone of your data, processes, and tools, so I’d look for a Head of Sales with a Revenue Ops background rather than someone who spent most of their career as a coach.
Scale-Up
A Revenue Operations lead as a Head of Sales will come with limitations. So as you scale, you’ll certainly need to break this up. I’d look for two peers:
Director of Sales - Focuses on people (hiring, onboarding, coaching) and process. Continuously coaching in all four areas above, and continuously leveling up talent.
A Director of Rev Ops - Focuses on data, tools, and projects that improve the effectiveness of the team. This person works on the machine - they might be shipping new SDR outreach templates and measuring how it improves conversion, or shipping a new live-call-transfer tool and measuring how it improves conversion. Notice the theme: shipping and measurement.
I’d pair the Director of Sales with a strong Director of Growth Operations who can work on the machine and can actually drive projects that can improve customer performance.
Head of Inbound Marketing / SEO
A lot of the time Inbound Marketing / SEO takes years to really grow into a core channel. So consider product-channel fit—if this isn’t going to be a superpower for your business, perhaps ignore this channel entirely until you get to ~$10M/year in revenue.
But if you really want to make an investment in this channel, here’s what it might look like at a startup and at a scale-up:
Startup
Similar to Lifecycle Marketing, Inbound Marketing/SEO is another channel that’s at an intersection between two different talents. You’re trying to solve two different problems:
1: A framework for knowing the keywords I want to rank for, and measuring if our SEO content is driving revenue
2: A powerhouse writer who can also manage other freelancers to help our SEO efforts scale
It’s unlikely you’ll ever find both #1 and #2 in the same person. So when you’re starting out, my suggestion is to actually give #1 to your head of Google Paid Search. Have that person own the framework, decide what keywords you want to rank for on the organic side, and measure the success of your SEO efforts in terms of leads and revenue.
Then hire a content virtuoso who can focus on just #2. They’ll need at least two quarters to pick up some momentum. And if it’s working, start giving them more freelancers so they can scale faster.
Scale-up
As you scale up, you might be the type of business with “programmatic SEO” or “Product-Led Growth SEO.” An example is Codecademy, a free online learning platform. This free model lent itself naturally to programmatic SEO. Every single page of its online courses was accessible to Google and could be indexed, resulting in thousands of pages of unique, high-quality content for long-tail keywords like “loops in Python”, which ranked well on Google.
This sort of strategy won’t work well for most companies, but when it’s successfully implemented, it can be a superpower in its own right. It’s also not something that can be a side-project because it’ll require more engineering resources than you would initially expect, plus constant maintenance. It’ll only be set up to succeed if it's a core part of a product-led growth strategy.
Conclusion
Assembling the perfect marketing team is difficult, more so at a startup where resources are limited and change is rapid. But it’s not impossible as long as you know what the company needs to succeed. Look for multitalented, hungry leaders with a deep desire to learn and who aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and get things done.
At the same time, don’t hesitate to outsource projects and find ways to automate tasks. Save your team’s energy and brain power for projects that drive growth. And like I said last week, never lose sight of what you’ll need to succeed in the long run to grow alongside your company.
Good luck!
🐐🚨 I have not accepted new clients for the past year, but I'll have 1️⃣ spot opening up in October.
If you know a startup that could use some help, please reach out.