S5E13 – How to Hire Your First Marketing Leader for a B2B SaaS Startup With Andrew Davis

In today’s episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast, host Joran Hofman sits down with Andrew Davis, the CMO at Paddle, to explore how to hire your first marketing leader for a B2B SaaS Startup. In this comprehensive guide, they dive into the critical relationship between founders and their first marketing hire. Andrew shares valuable insights on building a successful founder-marketer relationship, a topic that continues to resonate with many B2B SaaS founders. Having been both a founder and a marketer, Andrew offers a unique perspective on the dynamics and challenges faced by both parties. This episode is a must-listen for any founder looking to hire their first marketing professional and establish a successful partnership.

Understanding the Founder-Marketer Dynamic

To understand how to hire your first marketing leader for a B2B SaaS Startup, Andrew begins by explaining the unique challenges marketers face when working with founders. Founders, particularly those with technical backgrounds, often struggle with marketing because it doesn’t come naturally to them. This can lead to micromanagement and high urgency demands. Marketing is often perceived as something everyone has an opinion on, which can be both a challenge and an opportunity for marketers. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for building a successful relationship.

Why Marketing Can Be Intimidating for Founders

Marketing is often seen as a daunting task by founders, primarily because it can be a financial black hole. The fear of spending money without seeing immediate returns, coupled with the chaos of comparison and the sales-marketing divide, makes marketing intimidating. Additionally, marketing jargon and buzzwords can be overwhelming. Andrew emphasizes the importance of building a glossary to demystify marketing terms and help founders better understand the landscape.

When to Hire Your First Marketing Person

The decision to hire a marketing professional is not straightforward and depends on various factors. Key tipping points include achieving product-market fit, scaling beyond founder-led sales, and raising a funding round. It’s essential to consider whether you can hire before deciding if you should. Andrew highlights the importance of understanding the problem you’re solving and the stage of your business when making this decision.

Watch on YouTube

The Foundation of a Successful Relationship

Empathy is the cornerstone of a successful founder-marketer relationship. Andrew stresses the importance of understanding the founder’s perspective, including the burden of responsibility, prioritization pressure, and the loneliness of the role. In return, founders should empathize with marketers, recognizing their need for customer proximity, consistency, and support. Building empathy fosters a collaborative environment where both parties can thrive.

Common Mistakes in Hiring Marketing Professionals

Andrew outlines common pitfalls when hiring the first marketing professional. One major mistake is hiring someone and then completely handing over marketing responsibilities. It’s crucial to remain involved and provide guidance. Another mistake is hiring too senior without considering the fit for the current stage of the business. Proper onboarding and support are essential to avoid these pitfalls.

Aligning Marketing with Go-to-Market Strategy

Understanding your go-to-market motion is vital when hiring a marketing professional. Different business models require different marketing approaches, from self-serve product-led growth to enterprise sales. Andrew explains how the role of marketing changes based on the annual contract value and the type of sales process. Aligning your marketing strategy with your business model ensures a cohesive approach to growth.

The Key Marketing Fundamentals

Marketing fundamentals should be a shared responsibility between the founder and the marketer. Andrew emphasizes the importance of viewing marketing from the buyer’s perspective, spending time on the company’s story, and benchmarking performance together. These fundamentals provide a solid foundation for effective marketing and help prevent misunderstandings.

The Importance of Hiring for the Right Marketing Profile

When hiring a marketing professional, consider seniority, stage of the business, and profile. Andrew introduces Dave Kellogg’s framework, which categorizes marketers into product, growth, communications, and sales development profiles. Understanding your company’s needs and aligning them with the marketer’s strengths is crucial for success.

Building Trust: The Key to a Winning Relationship

Trust is the cornerstone of a successful founder-marketer relationship. Andrew introduces the trust formula, which includes credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-interest. By focusing on these elements, both parties can build a strong foundation of trust. Regular communication, empathy, and a shared vision are essential for maintaining a successful partnership.

Best Practices and Success Stories

Andrew shares best practices for building a winning founder-marketer relationship. He emphasizes the importance of surrounding the marketer with support, whether through coaching or connecting them with industry peers. Regularly revisiting the fundamentals and first principles ensures alignment and prevents silos. These practices foster a collaborative environment where both founders and marketers can thrive.

Conclusion on how to hire your first marketing leader for a B2B SaaS Startup

In conclusion, hiring your first marketing professional and building a winning relationship requires careful consideration and empathy. By understanding the unique dynamics of the founder-marketer relationship, aligning marketing with your business model, and focusing on trust and support, you can create a successful partnership that drives growth and success for your B2B SaaS company. Remember, the journey is about surviving long enough to succeed, and with the right insights and relationships, you can achieve your goals.

Key Timestamps

• (0:00) – Introduction and Marketing Challenges
• (1:36) – Andrew’s Background and Experience
• (2:38) – Challenges and Pitfalls in Marketing
• (4:05) – Benefits of Diverse Input in Marketing
• (4:16) – Why Marketing is Scary
• (6:02) – When to Hire Your First Marketing Person
• (7:07) – Trigger Points for Hiring a Marketer
• (8:52) – Understanding the Founder’s Burden
• (12:02) – Marketers’ Challenges in Early-Stage Companies
• (13:32) – Transitioning Marketing Strategy
• (15:28) – Go-to-Market Motion and Founder-Marketer Relationship
• (17:48) – Channels and Tactics in Marketing
• (20:02) – The Importance of Benchmarking
• (23:52) – The Importance of Fit in Hiring
• (26:02) – Complementary Skills in Hiring
• (27:15) – Building Trust in the Relationship
• (28:14) – Trust Formula Explanation
• (30:30) – Advice for SaaS Founders at Different Stages
• (31:01) – Importance of Insight Over Cash

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Andrew

Marketing always sits on multiple horizons. You’ve got to do everything right now to hit this quarter, and you’ve got to be thinking about what’s happening two years out and building a position and a brand and an audience for them. And that multiple time frames creates one of the biggest prioritization pressures and balances the strategic choice that a market has to make. Many founders, particularly technical founders, marketing feels like something they need to do, but also doesn’t come as a muscle memory, doesn’t come as something they do naturally. The marketer you’ve hired will never know as much as you. They’ll never have as much industry knowledge, as many relationships with those early customers. They’ll never have the deep product knowledge because of what you’ve built. So they never can know as much as you, even as much as they try.

[00:00:51.090] – Joran

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about hiring your first marketing person and building a winning founder-marketing relationship. We’re going to discuss a topic with a familiar voice as Andrew Davies is joining me again. The episode with Andrew from Season 1 is still the most listened-to episode on the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. So check it out. We’re talking about go to market in season one. Without further ado, if People really want to have a big intro. Listen to that episode first. Welcome back, Andrew. We’re going to talk about building a winning founder-marketer relationship. I guess to really start at the basics, to build a winning relationship, we need to know how founders think about marketers and also the other way around. Can you maybe dive into this as the first topic?

[00:01:36.090] – Andrew

Yeah, absolutely. My background is that I was a founder before being a marketer. Now I’ve got a bunch of experience working alongside founders, but also marketing to founders. I gave a talk on this topic at a conference in London a month or so ago. I did some research about it in order to understand it better from speaking to a bunch of founders of leading marketers I know. Yes, we can dive into this topic, but it’s definitely not all my opinions. It’s stuff I’ve vetted or gathered from other people, too. Because I do think it’s one of those relationships that if you get right, magic happens. But there are lots of pitfalls. And so often marketers have challenges working with founders that are extremely driven, often very high urgency. They often feel like they’re being micromanaged because founders learn and want to learn, have a very high bias for action, and also just get into the details and first principles around things. And marketing tends to be one of those departments where everybody thinks that they’ve got a marketing plan that will work. I don’t go to our CTO and ask him how to reset or instruct him how to reset our server architecture.

[00:02:38.090] – Andrew

But it’s very easy for people all across the business to come and say, How about this in marketing? I’ve seen this in marketing. And so marketers have that challenge all day, every day. We can talk more about that and the pitfalls, but benefits of that in a moment. And then if you flip it, I think many founders, particularly technical founders, marketing feels like something they need to do, but also doesn’t come as a muscle memory, doesn’t come as something they do naturally. There’s this challenge of knowing they need to do it, knowing they need to grow, but also not knowing how to, or perhaps not even liking it or wanting to learn about it because it feels like this sleazy madmen advertising thing that happens over there.

[00:03:18.340] – Joran

Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. As you mentioned, everybody has an opinion about marketing. Either they maybe hate it, they find it sleazy, or think they can do it themselves a lot quicker, faster, or their nephew can even do it for a lot less money.

[00:03:31.020] – Andrew

Yeah, and that’s a real benefit sometimes, right? Because if you manage that correctly, what it means is you get really varied input, which often you don’t get in other functions who don’t have that same dynamic. I’m an optimist, so I just always like to see these as positive. I love the fact that there’s people from all across the business who are willing to input and give ideas into marketing strategy and marketing prioritization. But yes, it does mean that often you become a filter. It’s really important, though, as marketers, we don’t just become defensive to that. We don’t become defensive to our ideas versus others. So I definitely think an open mindset to that challenge is the way to go.

[00:04:05.340] – Joran

Yeah. And I think in general, a lot of BDB SaaS founders find marketing challenging. I listened to your presentation, you even called it scary. Can you elaborate on that?

[00:04:16.170] – Andrew

So I think marketing is scary from a bunch of reasons. Firstly, it can be a budget black hole. There’s an almost limitless amount of money you can spend, particularly on paid marketing, and see very little return from if you get it wrong. It’s scary, firstly, because it can be this budget black hole, and you just don’t know how much you’re going to waste or spend before it comes back to you. And it takes time to come back. So it’s a budget black hole because you don’t often see instant results. Then it’s scary because there’s this chaos of comparison. We just spoke about how everyone has an opinion on it. You’ve got this challenge where you see everyone else’s marketing. It’s very front office. Therefore, everyone is always comparing what I did with what someone else did. Everyone on your team will be constantly getting marketing from other people. And we’ll be comparing that with what you’re doing. So it’s this comparison issue. You then also step into this marketing sales divide in many businesses. If you’re the founder or the CEO, and you’re not particularly commercial, suddenly you’re now facing this political battle between marketing and sales where perhaps they don’t see eye to eye, and it’s hard to know how to navigate or mediate that.

[00:05:20.260] – Andrew

And then finally, I think marketing can be scary because even more than most other functions, we make up all kinds of acronyms, we make up all kinds of alliteration, and often the verbiage, the vocabulary, is more complicated than the principles. So there’s this buzzword bingo, we always get lost in.

[00:05:38.500] – Joran

Yeah, and this is why marketing people also like to build a glossary so we can put all our terms into one big glossary. For technical founders who don’t like to do marketing themselves or for founders who have done marketing themselves but can’t do it due to time or any other reason, when would be, I guess, the first right time to hire your first marketing person?

[00:06:02.120] – Andrew

All good questions have the answer. It depends. When you’re an early-stage founder, you need to ask and answer the question, Can I hire this first? Before we think about, Should I? And then if we should, what’s the right fit, and I know we’ll probably come on to market fit later in this conversation. There are a few key tipping points when I think it might be right time to hire a marketer. The first one is when you’ve got some first semblance of product market fit, and now the amount of time it takes to scale those conversations, whether in person or whether that is through growth marketing, through digital methods, now is dragging time away from the founder. Founders should often be in that first market making mode of understanding the problem, understanding whether there’s a solution, understanding how that can fit. But as soon as there’s some semblance of that working, then often that’s a good trigger point to hire in a marketer to fully explore and then build out. Another time is when you’re trying to scale beyond founder-led sales. If you’re in a business where the founder is closing all deals and you want to scale beyond that, then that’s often a trigger point for investing in a marketing function that can help you do that.

[00:07:07.000] – Andrew

There are some other trigger points as well. Often, if you just raised a round and there’s the burden of growth on you, that can become the trigger point for going and hiring the first marketer because although you might have wanted to have done it beforehand, you just might not have the capacity. Those are a few reasons why you might pull the trigger on that first hire.

[00:07:23.840] – Joran

Yeah, it comes back to what you said at the beginning, Can I hire a person instead of should I? Then you would have the money, you would have What’s the problem you’re running into? Let’s say people are running into the challenges you mentioned and they’re going to hire the first marketing person. How should founders and maybe even marketers prepare themselves when they’re the first hire to get this winning relationship between founders and marketers?

[00:07:45.680] – Andrew

I think great relationships are built off empathy. If we look at this from both sides of the fence, as a marketer, looking at that founder, yes, maybe they have 100 ideas a day, or maybe they blow hot and cold and suddenly they talk to you for weeks because they’re focused on something else. Maybe they’re very high urgency. Maybe they think their way is always right. Whatever it might be, whatever your accusation of the founder you work with, have empathy because the founder has this intense burden of responsibility. I remember being in that co founder seat alongside Ed as we built IDEO. You’ve got this burden of everyone’s livelihoods, everyone’s mortgage payments. You’ve got this burden of the investor’s money if you’ve raised it or customers if you’ve signed them early doors. You’ve got this intense burden of responsibility you’re carrying all the time. Secondly, you’ve got this constant prioritization pressure. Now, every leader in a business thinks they’ve got prioritization challenges, but the founder, the CEO, has the ultimate prioritization challenge because they have to trade off department’s needs against each other and the strategy and sequencing of what the overall business needs to do, not just about whether to spend marketing dollar on A or a B.

[00:08:52.860] – Andrew

And so there’s this constant pressure of prioritization where almost every conversation they have, someone is asking them for more priority. And then thirdly, the founder role is really lonely. In marketing, we’ve got these great events we go to. I’ve met you at many of them, or you can go to Pavillion or Exit5, or there’s lots of good communities out there for marketers. But for founders, although there are starting to be better communities, it’s a lonely role. And often you have very little peer support and community support. Those are three things that I think marketers should really think about how they can perceive the founder role. And then I think there’s some things you can to founders as a marketer. You can give them customer proximity, understanding about the customer. You can give them the simplicity of first principles. Tell them not just the decisions you’re making, but the principles behind those decisions because that’s the language the founders speak. You can give them options rather than just saying, We can’t do this or we can’t do that.

[00:09:47.280] – Joran

I think it’s really good because what you mentioned with the founders and with the community, I am part of a couple of communities, but in the end, with your day-to-day things, you’re not going to ask other founders because they’re busy and they have no insights in how you actually run the company. In the end, you will be lonely no matter how many communities you find. 100%.

[00:10:04.730] – Andrew

Then if we look at that opposite side of the telescope, so now we’re the founder looking at the marketer, the empathy we should be having is the marketer you’ve hired will never know as much as you. They’ll never have as much industry knowledge, as many relationships with those early customers. They’ll never have the deep product knowledge because of what you’ve built. So they never can know as much as you, even as much as they try. Secondly, that marketer has got to deal with multiple time frames of operation. It can sound simple to hire them to do marketing, but marketing always sits on multiple horizons. You’ve got to do everything right now to hit this quarter, and you’ve got to be thinking about what’s happening two years out and building a position and a brand and an audience for them. And that multiple time frames creates one of the biggest prioritization pressures and balances the strategic choice that a market has to make. And then a marketer must work to fit in and must fit in for it to work. What I mean by that is that the right marketer, but in the wrong company and in the wrong fit company will never work out.

[00:11:07.630] – Andrew

We’ll talk about fit in a moment. You’ve got to really have empathy for marketers who are in that situation where they might be fantastic. You might have hired a great person and a great skill set, but they’re just not right for your go-to-market or your stage. What you as a founder can give them is, again, you can give them customer proximity. You probably have more customer relationships than them. You might be doing more customer conversations than them. How How can you give that to the marketer? How could you bring them into those conversations? How can you give them that insight? Give them those relationships? Secondly, a common challenge in the marketer’s find of founders is them blowing hot and cold, being very intense and micromanaging everything and then disappearing and focusing on a fundraise or a big customer or something else. How can you give that marketer consistency? How can you give them regular input? Then the third thing is you can give them budget and time. It’s very difficult to do marketing if you don’t have some budget and if you don’t have some time frame to operate within. Those are three things that the founder can give to the marketer once they’ve got empathy for that situation.

[00:12:06.730] – Joran

Yeah, and as you mentioned, it all starts with empathy. You have to really understand what the other person is going to do for you. And you’re working together, you’re building this relationship, this winning relationship we’re going to talk about. I guess if we turn the table a little bit, these are the best practices or a bit best practice. What are some common mistakes happening when companies or founders are hiring their first marketer?

[00:12:27.760] – Andrew

I think one of the most common mistakes is getting to that point when you’re so desperate to hand it over as a founder, you then hire someone and hand everything over and divorce yourself of the responsibility. The solution is always, yes, make that higher and stay involved and keep your voice on it and keep learning to understand. I think that’s one common mistake, hiring someone and then just handing it all over and focusing in a completely different direction. Interlinked with that is the common challenge of hiring too senior. Now, if you’ve got the capital to go and hire someone who’s very experienced, it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Often, I see people hire people who look like what they want to look like in the future, but they’re not hiring for the fit they’re in right now. It’s a very special type of person who has already done a journey with a startup and has got that successful outcome of growth, but now wants to start back at the very hard yards and early again. I think often people actually hire too senior. They hire someone who now wants to work in PowerPoint rather than wants to work inside your core marketing systems.

[00:13:32.820] – Andrew

Those are two common problems. I think the third one is thinking about this process of transitioning marketing strategy, transitioning marketing ownership to a new person has to be really handled with care. Often it’s set it and forget it, dump on an onboarding, email to the marketer, and then let them have a go. That, I believe, is a real mistake. Thinking about how you’re going to surround that marketer with the things they need to be successful is important. The mistake is often overlooking that and not thinking about peer community for them, not connecting them with two or three people in your network where they can really learn about what you want them to learn about, or not employing a fractional coach or someone else to help support them through that first year so that you’ve got something more than just a single person hired.

[00:14:14.230] – Joran

Yeah, because it’s a relationship and you need to help this person to become successful. I think what you mentioned there as well, hiring two senior is hard. I don’t know how you see, but if people or if somebody grew into another company really high, then indeed, they work in PowerPoint and they work in all this strategy. Now for the first market, they just have to do the work, as in they would have to actually do maybe the things they didn’t enjoy that much anymore in their previous job.

[00:14:41.540] – Andrew

That’s a hard balance, right? You’ve got to find people for early-stage startups that want to get their hands dirty. It also is a balance based on how long you’ve got on your next inflection point and how much capital you’ve got to spend. How many mistakes can you make along the journey? Because there are some instances where hiring more senior can work out if you’ve also got the infrastructure, team support capital to make that work fast. I think the challenge becomes where everyone’s bought into this fast growth vision, but there isn’t the capital to achieve that. So that person, as a pretty senior experienced, higher in the mix just becomes stranded. They can’t get it from zero to one.

[00:15:14.650] – Joran

Yeah, and here, I guess the question you set, can I hire the person I lead? Or can I do this? If you are hiring senior, can you also hire, I guess, the next thing? Do you have budget? Can I actually get them to the point you want them to be?

[00:15:28.190] – Andrew

Yeah.

[00:15:29.100] – Reditus Ad

Are you struggling to find people and companies which have access to your ideal customer profile. At Reditus, we just launched the second side of the marketplace, which allows you to search, filter, and contact B2B SaaS affiliates which have access to the audience you’re looking for. We do this by leveraging first-party data sources. Want to learn more? Go to getreditus.com.

[00:15:50.370] – Joran

If we’re going to take a step back in memory lane, go-to-market, how does the go-to-market motion a SaaS company has into play when looking at the founder marketing relationship and hiring the type of marketer?

[00:16:03.040] – Andrew

This question of fit is the biggest challenge we all face when it comes to hiring early-stage companies, hiring marketers. Firstly, we got to think about the mode of operation you’re in. Are you in a high competition market or is it a new category? Are you in a high consideration purchase or is it something that people buy quickly? Because all of those have different ways of marketing. If we think about the winning by design framework, you can map your ACV of your product on one side with the number of clients you’ve got win per annum on the vertical axis. What you find is in low annual contract value, high number of customer environments, you’ve got to lead with self-serve and a product-led approach. Then as the annual contract value goes up and you need less per year, then you It’s probably more inside sales motion, maybe a one-stage close, straight into a rep and then closed, or two-stage close where it’s a BDR and then into a rep. Then as you move up, perhaps beyond 50, 60K ACV, you get into the world of enterprise sales, field sales. Then as you go beyond hundreds of thousands of dollars per deal, you’re into a very specific named account type marketing process.

[00:17:06.140] – Andrew

So the role of a marketing in every one of those different types of environments is different. And it’s also different by stage because actually, at those super early stage, when you’re sub-10 customers, pretty much regardless of whether you’re closing a deal or a million-dollar deal, it’s going to be founder-led network, founder-led outbound in most examples. And the marketer’s role is to support that across the board, regardless as of ACV. As you then start maturing as a business, marketing’s role could be focusing on inbound if it’s largely self-serving product-led or low-end of inside sales, or it could be outbound, or it could be focused on target accounts and named accounts and supporting the sales reps. So the mode of a marketer changes dramatically based on the type of business you’re in.

[00:17:48.590] – Joran

For people who don’t know winning by design or product-led growth, I had Wesh Bush, who basically talks about product-led growth all the time. I had Jaco van der Koy, founder of winning by design, so check that out as well if you don’t understand these terms or want to learn more about that. It’s a good point because I guess with the different ACVs you have, average contract value, you will need different volumes as well. Whereas in product led growth, you need high volume because the contracts are lower. And enterprise, you might need only a couple of deals per year. So the things a market has to do are completely different. You might see it also on the channels you’re using. You already mentioned ABM, but is there a big difference in the channels a If there has to use based on the motion you’re going to choose?

[00:18:33.750] – Andrew

Different channels, different tactics. If you’re selling $100,000 annual license fee, then flying into cities and hosting steak dinners is definitely something that’s on the table. If you’re selling a $5 a month collaboration software, it’s very difficult. Unless you’re doing it for customer learning or some other purpose, it’s very difficult to justify that type of activity. I’m using extremes there, but absolutely different channels work for different ACVs.

[00:18:59.090] – Joran

Before we We’re going to continue the conversation, are there any other fundamentals we need to know before hiring the first marketer?

[00:19:06.080] – Andrew

I think this question of what are the marketing fundamentals is the one that you should have with that marketer as you hire them. You should know before you go out and find that marketer. The things I’m talking about here are, rather than thinking about marketing as a set of playbooks and funnels and tactics we could go and do, thinking about it from the buyer’s perspective, let’s reverse engineer the buyer’s point of view here. How do they come across you? How do they justify this need? What do they think about the problem? Who do they learn from? The fundamentals of marketing should always be looking through the buyer’s lens. Another principle would be that the marketer and the founder together need to spend time on the story quarterly. The company’s story is the company’s strategy. Ben Horowitz writes. And so thinking about how you make sure that’s something that’s happening between marketer and founder regularly is important. You know that your core model as a business in terms of the forecast you’ve put out there, the targets, they’re going to be wrong. But how do How do you work together on making them better over time?

[00:20:02.270] – Andrew

How do you make those assumptions tighter over time? Thinking about multiple sources of demand is a core principle in both software businesses. There isn’t just a marketing funnel. There’s usually BDRs creating pipeline, account executives creating pipeline, often partners or channel creating pipeline. There might be affiliates. Thinking about this carefully and aspiring for multiple sources of demand is really important as a fundamental. Otherwise, you get stuck into this quite challenging situation where marketing is seen as the only source of demand. It is a team sport. Finally, a key fundamental will be to benchmark performance and do it together. Benchmarks can often be weaponised by the founder saying, Look, we’re not good at any of these things, cause, or the marketer saying, Look, we’re not spending enough money or we’re above everyone else in the market. Why are you complaining? So do that process together. Find some benchmarks that make sense for your industry, your stage, your ACV, and think about that together to make sure you’re constantly tweaking the model. Those are the fundamentals I think should be part of the conversation.

[00:20:58.360] – Joran

Any tips, advice on where people can find these benchmarks?

[00:21:02.150] – Andrew

Yeah, I think it does depend on industry. We partner with Kyle Poeyer and High Alpha, formerly Openview, and a whole bunch of SaaSmetrics. Ray Wright publishes a whole bunch. People like C. J. Gustafson and others talk about these. Ben Murray speaks a lot about SaaS metrics. I know in Europe, there are a lot of people. I know GP Bullhound do some of this. I know SASE-Yst and some other conferences publish benchmarks as well. So yeah, there’s loads of places you can go. The main thing is to think about what works for your situation because the The companies they’re surveying or getting the data from will change the outcomes. We see a whole bunch of data, huge amount of data on the very small SMB end, your small businesses who are doing self-serve. So it’s a great data set if you’re a small business, ie, sub 10, 20 million ARR, and most of your business is self-served. But if you’re not, if you’re doing ABM into trying to sell into massive governments selling million dollar deals, then our data set won’t be very relevant to you. So think about that when you’re looking at those data points.

[00:21:59.240] – Joran

You can look at benchmark, but has to relate to what you’re currently doing and to your business. So we’ve now covered the fundamentals. Let’s assume these are in place. How does a SaaS founder go about in hiring their first marketer, what they should be looking at?

[00:22:13.860] – Andrew

I think this comes down to three things. They’re all obvious in some ways, but maybe we can dive in to the last one in more depth because I think that’s the most interesting one. Firstly, seniority. We’ve already covered this. Do you need a senior marketer or a junior marketer? It makes very easily categorize people into those two big buckets. But what What we’re meaning here is, do you want someone who’s done it before and is going to bring in knowledge, is going to bring in muscle memory, is going to bring in a whole bunch of rules of thumbs and perhaps some hires they can bring with them from their former environment? Or do we want someone who’s going to learn everything on the job? It’s not just a budget thing, it’s a mode of business. If you’re a new entrant into a new category, sometimes hiring someone who hasn’t done it before is really helpful because there’s a whole bunch that needs to be figured out. If you are trying to disrupt a space completely, then finding someone who who doesn’t have as much learned experience from large company operations can be quite helpful. But you’ve got to think about that justification.

[00:23:06.090] – Andrew

So seniority is the first. Then it’s stage, your stage of business. Are you 10 customers in or 100 customers in? Is your MRR $1,000 a month or $100,000 a month or a million a month? And that is partly the stage of business in terms of your own organization, the capital you might have available, the customer references and confidence you might have. It speaks to a whole bunch of things. Thinking about finding marketers who either have had multiple roles at your stage and beyond or have a very clear justification as to why they want that stage is really important. The third one, which we can dive into more depth if you want, is profile. Finding the right marketer that fits the profile of your business, the profile of you as an individual, as a founder, but also the profile of what you’ve got to do from your go-to-market fit.

[00:23:52.570] – Joran

Yeah, I definitely want to dive more into this because I made a note on what you said, Must work to fit in, must fit into work. I guess this goes down to the profile, right?

[00:24:03.320] – Andrew

Yeah, totally. There’s a few ways you can look at this. I like Dave Kellogg’s approach here. If you haven’t read his sub stack, then do go read all that he writes about. He’s a multiple-time CMO and CEO in the software space. He talks about marketers having profile that maps across four different categories. Product, does this person have a technical viewpoint? Are they able to think about differentiation and copy? Are they able to think about descriptions? So product marketing. Secondly, growth, does this person understand systems and one-to-many scaling? Are they going to be the HubSpot admin? Are they thinking about how to use AI and outbound? The growth marketer test and learn. The third one is communications. Is this person a content-first person? Are they thinking about the story. They’re thinking about perhaps more brand motions? The fourth one is sales development. Is this person used to running a sales development team? Are they going to hire perhaps more junior BDRs or SDRs to do outbound or to process inbound demand? Those are four fits, four different ways that a marketer can spike. I think I can’t remember the exact way he frames his advice, but basically, you should assign yourself a certain number of points you’re allowed to have and distribute them across those four.

[00:25:13.320] – Andrew

That’s a good way of understanding the fit of a marketer. And this is really important because sometimes I get brought into a hiring decision with someone I’m helping advise and they say, Oh, we’ve got these three people. Could you help compare them? I speak to them and one of them spikes hard on product, one spikes hard on SDR, one spikes hard on growth. And so you’re comparing apples with oranges and bananas. The response might be, They’re all nice people. But what do you want as a company? Do you need growth or do you need comms? This is where I’m thinking not just about the profile of the marketer, but also perhaps the profile of the team or the founder. If you’re a founder that spikes really hard on product and you deep everything about the product, but you’re also good at explaining it and justifying it and showing how it competes with other vendors and describing it, then don’t hire a marketer that spikes on product. Make sure they spike on growth or something else. That That fit is also important when you come to the profile.

[00:26:02.540] – Joran

Yeah. So make sure you actually don’t hire the same skills, but hire somebody better in something else than yourself. One thing I find interesting, you mentioned sales development. We’re talking about marketing, right? What does it mean in this case? Are you expecting this person to set up the sales team or hiring these SDRs you were talking about?

[00:26:19.020] – Andrew

The sales development function can sit in both marketing and sales, depending on a bunch of reasons. I’ve managed it in multiple roles as well as not managed it. I think it really depends on two things. Where is their leadership capacity to take this on? And where is there the biggest alignment challenge? If you’ve got a biggest alignment challenge when you hand over an opportunity into sales, then probably SDR should sit within sales. But if the biggest problem is at the earlier stage or the top of funnel stage where campaigns are not being followed up on, then perhaps it’s better to sit within marketing. And so it can sit either way. But often, if you’re in an early stage world where the founder is the core salesperson, the marketing hire might run those SDRs because you don’t have a sales leader in yet.

[00:26:58.900] – Joran

Yeah. That makes sense. Let’s assume we found the perfect profile. We hired somebody. How important is the relationship between marketing and founder? We already discussed a little bit at the beginning, and maybe even more importantly, how important is trusting each other going forward.

[00:27:15.720] – Andrew

I know you’ve come across this formula before, but I sometimes refer back to the trust formula. I’m not sure who came up with it. It was probably McKinsey’s or someone. The formula is, for those who don’t know it, trust equals credibility times reliability times intimacy, by self-interest. When we’re trying to build trust with anybody, but particularly in this environment, I think it’s important to hold in mind that formula. So as you’re, whether you’re a marketer or a founder, as you’re approaching that relationship, think about the other individual. How credible are they? How reliable are they? How intimate are they with you? So how much do you know about each other? And how self-interested are they? But this is mostly useful as a reflective mechanism, asking the other person about how they perceive you and asking yourself how you are perceived. Am I showing Am I the one who’s growing up as credible? Am I the one who’s going and finding examples of how people could do this better? Am I coming up with ideas on how we can improve? Am I coming with confidence and data? Secondly, reliability. Am I turning up on time? Am I making sure I do what I say I’m going to do?

[00:28:14.680] – Andrew

Do I hit the target so I have a very strong justification for when I don’t hit those targets? Am I reliable? Finally, intimate. Am I building a relationship with this person, this founder or this marketer, where they know that I care about more than just the transactional relationship we Am I self-interested? Or am I putting the interests of this business and this other person, this founder or the marketer, ahead of my own? We all have a blend of self-interest and other interests. But in most startup environments, it’s so important to be collaborative. It’s so important to put others’ interests ahead of yours, particularly when it comes into journeys over the long run. Those are a few questions I would ask ourselves as we approach that relationship of building trust.

[00:28:55.160] – Joran

Yeah, nice. Any best practices or examples? Because we talked We talked about mistakes. If we turn it around, do you have any best practice examples on hiring your first marketer and to really make it a winning relationship?

[00:29:08.440] – Andrew

Yeah, we’ve talked about a whole bunch of best practice on this call. One of those mistakes was not bringing in someone alongside your marketer to help support them if you don’t do marketing. I think one bit of best practice is often to think about who could be a coach. It doesn’t have to be someone you’re paying, but who could be someone who once a month could pick up a phone call with this marketer and with this founder and just ask how things are going. It might be someone on your board, it might be a A friend who’s in marketing, it might be someone you pay to come and host that call. I often think that helps people embed in the strategy and bed in the communication, but also it helps make sure you don’t get into a rut of finger-pointing and forgetting to do that relationship building. That’s one bit of best practice, I think, is really important. The other bit that I’ve referred to above, but I think is so key here, is making sure that the conversations between the marketer and the founder constantly come back to the fundamentals and to the first principles rather getting lost into an array of different tactic choices and channel choices.

[00:30:04.000] – Andrew

If you come back to why are we doing this? What is the buyer experience? How does they see the world? I think that’s really important. If you’re going back to first principles, going back to the fundamentals, and doing that regularly, once a week, once a month, however it works in your diary, and you’re honoring that time to each other, then that really helps. Because I do think that the challenges often come where you have this sense of blowing hot and cold, where people get super busy in their own silos and aren’t having that regular exchange of context.

[00:30:30.680] – Joran

Yeah, and in the end, that’s super simple. You call it the fundamentals, but it’s so important because at one point, otherwise, you’re just going into a different direction and you’re not going to be aligned anymore and you end up in different silos, as you mentioned. Cool. We’re going to start wrapping things up a little bit. These I think the questions are going to be familiar for yourself because these are the into the summary episodes. When we go a bit more broader, when we’re going to talk about growing and scaling a B2B SaaS, you talk to a lot of SaaS founders. What advice would you give who’s just starting out and to 10K MRR.

[00:31:01.700] – Andrew

This is true of all stages, but I do feel in the early stages that insight is more valuable than cash. That might be counterintuitive because you’re so cash starved at those early stages. But if you can find out why a customer what you’re selling, how they choose to decide on it, and what customer is really successful by buying it. That is insight you could almost take to the bank. You can build a company strategy, you can build a marketing strategy on it. And so focus in those early days on building insight, building a differentiated perspective, building your raison d’être, your right to exist. If you can do that, then you can really start thinking about scale. But if you have total question marks and confusion over those fundamental questions, it’s really hard.

[00:31:48.040] – Joran

Yeah, because you mentioned the messaging within the marketing. If you know exactly why people are buying, you have all these insights. It can also help you to get your ICP, but also attract the right customers later down the Let’s assume we pass 10K MRR. We’re going to make this big step towards 10 million ARR. What advice would you give SaaS founders here?

[00:32:08.030] – Andrew

Because you’re looking to scale to 10 million ARR, often the founder’s time is incredibly scarce in terms of the resource within the business. You’ve got to choose where you put your time. This is the same for marketing leaders, too. As things get busier and bigger, you’ve got to choose where you have the highest impact. One of the pieces of advice that I was given myself and I’ve given to multiple other people is to make sure a portion of your time is working on the business, not in the business. You’ve got to start getting outside of the business and looking back in, speaking to people who are outside, thinking about how this business as an asset grows, what are the resources you need, the leaders you need, the budgets you need. So yeah, when you’re going to that scaled process of 10 million and beyond, make sure you’re working on the business, not just in the business.

[00:32:54.720] – Joran

Makes sense. And again, I know you talk to a lot of SaaS founders. So besides my questions, revenue-wise, is there any other general advice towards SaaS founders who are now on their journey, which you can share with them?

[00:33:08.910] – Andrew

I think you’ve got to survive long enough to succeed. Everyone wants to talk about this triple, double, how you can scale your business through hyper-growth. It’s just not the reality for 99% of founders. The much more practical approach I would have is, how can we survive long enough to succeed? Because if you’re learning, then making sure you make payroll, making sure you close that next customer and making sure you don’t spend more than you’ve got in front of you is a really key part of survival that enables you to be positioned in the right market to be able to succeed later. I’ve been through those hard yards of actually not knowing what success looks like at many points in time, but knowing that our job was to survive through that next month or the next quarter in order to have a right to play for success later on. So wherever you are right now listening to this, if there’s loads of challenges facing you, survive long enough to succeed.

[00:33:57.310] – Joran

Coming back to the advice of 10K MR, get the insights you need to make sure you keep on going. Survival is one thing, but getting it with the right insights, getting in the right clients, making sure they’re actually getting value out of your tool will make the killer combination. Cool. Let’s see if I can summarize. When you’re looking to hire your first marketing person, be aware that marketing can be scary, can be a black hole, takes time to earn money back, you can burn a lot of money, and everybody will have an opinion about marketing. But only hire when you have some product market fit, understanding problems, skill beyond your founder-led sales, or maybe after raising around. Build a winning relationship, so have empathy for the founder and for the marketer, so the other way around as well. It must work to fit in, must fit into work. Keep that in mind when hiring. I guess, couple of mistakes, handing everything over at once or hiring two senior right away and not helping them to connect with the right people. Check your go-to-market motion, different marketing needs per motion and stage. Always start with founder-led at the beginning.

[00:34:58.770] – Joran

Fundamentals, reverse engineer the buying cycle, find benchmark for your industry, and when hiring, keep in mind seniority, stage of the business, profile, then check out product growth, communication, and sales development. Company-wise, check what qualities are needed. Last, check out the trust formula to see if it will fit in. Again, don’t forget the fundamentals, so check in regular with each other, so you’re not going to lose into silos. 10k MR, Insight is more valuable than Cash. 10 million ALR, choose where you can make the highest impact and in general, survive as long as you need to succeed.

[00:35:36.920] – Andrew

There we go. You’re a better summariser than ChatGPT.

[00:35:39.250] – Joran

Exactly. That’s what I’m trying to become nowadays. Cool. We’re going to add the sub stack from Dave Kellogg. We’re going to add the trust formula. We’re going to add the benchmarks you mentioned. If you want to get in contact with you, Andrew, how can they do?

[00:35:52.290] – Andrew

Find me on LinkedIn or at some form of event near you. I’m traveling all the time, many people face to face, so I’d love to meet you face to face, too.

[00:35:59.620] – Joran

I You see him everywhere at every event. If you go to any SaaS event, definitely go and talk to Andrew for sure. He often wears the pedal, hoodie or a hoodie or a sweater. You always find him like this. Where I wear blue, he wears pedal.

[00:36:13.710] – Andrew

There we go. There we go. Wrapping the brand.

[00:36:17.450] – Joran

Exactly. For people listening right now, if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review or rating on Spotify so we can boost the algorithms. We’re going to add a poll to this one as well. I want to hear what you guys thought of this episode. Thanks again for coming on, Andrew, or coming back in this case.

[00:36:34.320] – Andrew

Always good to chat and look forward to speaking again soon.

[00:36:37.190] – Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show, if you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.