Maverick Strategy’s Post

There’s one crucial piece to the startup puzzle that can make or break your journey: a skilled, savvy marketing team. Hiring the right marketing talent isn’t just about filling roles; it’s about finding people who understand your brand, know your target audience, and can help you grow strategically and sustainably. 🌟 Let’s break down why the right marketing team is essential to your startup’s success and how to make the best hiring decisions: https://lnkd.in/g36FFKHu

Is Your Marketing Team Ready for Growth? Scaling your marketing efforts without the right talent leads to bottlenecks. Without experts who can handle larger campaigns or evolving market trends, you'll miss growth opportunities. A fully staffed, capable team is key to adapting to changes. Prepare your team for growth by identifying future needs and proactively hiring or training new talent. #MarketingGrowth #Hiring #TeamSuccess 🌱

Founders - If you're hiring your first marketer or a marketing leader, then this advice I was given in 2022 is gold dust. Founders are often technical at B2B tech companies. So some don't understand what type of leaders to hire into their GTM teams. Because at a senior level most candidates can talk a good game. And you can end up hiring someone who doesn't quite fit your business. It's costly and ends up impacting your growth. =========== For anyone who's hired senior marketing roles, what do you think of Asia's advice? Let me know in the comments. 👇 And of course, let me know what you think is important for founders when they hire their first marketer. #b2bmarketing #hiring  

When you start building your early-stage GTM team, one of the biggest hiring decisions is: Should I hire a specialist or a generalist? Here's a breakdown of when to specialize: 👉 Clear-cut goals: If you have two top-priority objectives requiring dedicated focus, then two specialists might be ideal. For example, if in 3 months time you want to launch a full event strategy with planning, execution, and post-event follow-up PLUS a brand new outreach motion, it would be nearly impossible for one generalist to do that well. 👉 Proven processes: If you've figured out a marketing and sales process that works, hiring two specialists—one for marketing and one for sales—can help you scale up that process faster. Pro tip: make sure to hire specialists who can also hire and train people on the process! 👉 Budget: Ultimately, hiring multiple specialists will come down to budget. Extra funds alone isn't a good reason to hire specialists, but lack of budget is reason enough to hire a single generalist. So when should you hire a generalist? Consider hiring a generalist if: 👉 Tight budget: an experienced GTM generalist will know how to get the most bang for your buck. Give them clear targets to hit (# of demos booked/$X pipeline generated/buzz on social) and they'll figure out how to solve the problem. 👉 Still defining your marketing or sales approach: A generalist is uniquely equipped to experiment, iterate, and develop your strategy from 0. Until you have a strategy to pass on, you'd be wasting a specialist's time. 👉 You're uncertain how to hire for GTM: a generalist can provide valuable insights and even assist you in eventually recruiting specialists. Remember, the right choice depends on your specific needs and stage of growth 🌱 #startuplife #hiring #GTM #sales #marketing #earlystage

If there is one problem I see on a regular basis - it’s this one. A company gets some funding and wants to build an internal #marketing team - until they find out the cost of hiring experienced marketing talent. Here’s what to do and what not too do when getting started. #digitalmarketing #marketingstrategy

Want to hire the best marketer out there? Here’s the secret: Look for someone who’s addicted to CHANGE. The best marketers? They don’t just tolerate change, they live for it. They’re always chasing the next idea, experimenting, and pushing boundaries. It’s in their DNA. If they’re not shaking things up, they’re bored... If your marketer isn’t driving change, they’re playing it too safe—and in today’s world, that’s the fastest way to lose. So, when you’re interviewing your next marketing person, don’t just ask about past wins. Ask them about the last time they completely rethought a strategy, launched something risky, or jumped on a new trend before anyone else did. If they get excited talking about it, you’ve found your person. If not? Keep looking. Marketing is all about keeping things fresh, and the right hire will be someone who’s never afraid to shake things up. #marketing #hiring #leadership #skills

The best marketers are hard to keep because they love new challenges and don't tolerate/play the high school popularity contest known as office politics to maintain a status quo. They focus on doing the work that actually moves the needle, produces results, and they don't care who gets credit for it.

Always be hiring One of the biggest investments you make as a marketing leader is your team. When you’re busy, it’s easy to allow yourself to lift out of those hiring decisions because you need to focus elsewhere, but these choices are so critical to the business. So how do you make sure that your 20th hire is just as strong as your 3rd or 4th hire? One way I keep consistency is by making sure I am still on every last round interview. Another crucial element for me is that you need to deeply understand the parts of your team DNA that got you to where you are and which are crucial to your continued success. There are three core tenets of my marketing team that I like to index on: Velocity. I want to hire people who are action biassed and can show that they ship things consistently. I have said it before but I strongly believe that where a lot of teams fail is that an idea is only as good as it’s execution and so much just sits collecting dust and never makes it’s way into the world. Adaptability. If you join a scale-up, you need to be ok with change and more than being ok with it, you need to be the type of person who embraces it and thrives on it. This will not always be a fit for candidate preferences and so it is important to both be transparent about it but to also test for it. Nice. It is one of our core company values and I strongly believe a real reason for our success. I am always looking to hire people that will be additive to this culture and work very hard to weed out anyone that would be a threat to it. One of the questions I like to ask to test for this is: ‘how would people you work with today describe you?’ #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration

Last week we talked about the best way to hire the right growth marketer for your team. But you know what’s way better than hiring just a single talented Growth Marketer? Building a high-performing growth team. Now, this isn’t just about hiring smart people—it’s about crafting a system that drives sustainable, scalable results. Here’s how: 1. Align with Your GTM Motion Your go-to-market strategy is the North Star. Every decision, goal, and initiative should align with it. 2. Strike the Right Balance Empower your team with autonomy, but ensure there’s clear accountability. Freedom thrives when paired with responsibility. 3. Integrate Core Functions The magic happens where product, marketing, and engineering overlap. Break silos and make collaboration seamless.

Dang this was 2022?? 😂 Advice is still true. If hiring your first marketer, find someone who has the experience you need in a similar context. If you're at $1M and want to get to $10M and you're in a super competitive, but growing software category, find a marketer who's been there, done that. Maybe you're at $4M and want to get to $15M, but the software category is highly commoditized and not growing. Your first marketing leader should hopefully have experienced something like that. Point is that a lot of founders who aren't used to hiring for marketing look for "experience" and "skills" but not always in a context that's directly applicable to their own growth scenario.