You’re at the helm of a company primed for hockey-stick growth. Your product is in the hands of customers. Revenue is starting to flow. But as the horizon expands, so does the challenge of generating new leads — it’s no longer just about tapping into your network. Your investors and mentors are all telling you the same thing: “It’s time to invest in hiring out a full marketing team.”
It seems like the obvious next step, right? Bring on people who can manage all your marketing efforts, set your marketing strategy, and be in charge of building your team. They’ll manage all aspects and take it out of your hands.
But hiring a marketing team too early can set your company off course for months or years. The process is time consuming. You might hire the wrong person. You might hire people who have the wrong skills for your business. Your business’s needs might quickly change and require a different type of marketer. Each one of those mistakes can cost you time and money in the long run. There are few things you can do instead that will set up your company for present and future wins.
1. Focus on one thing at a time
You hear the phrase all the time from jet-setting consultants. You can’t “boil the ocean” - and they’re right. For early-stage companies’ marketing, if you try to do everything at once you’ll do nothing well. You need to learn what works. But more importantly, you need to learn what doesn’t and adapt. To start with, are you focused on increasing the top of your funnel or the bottom of your funnel? Does your business need to optimize the quantity of leads or the profitability of conversions? Setting broad goals when you’ve just put a foot into the world of growth marketing muddies your strategy and wastes effort. When you tackle one growth challenge at a time, you can learn from it, refine your approach, then move onto the next one.
2. Get just enough marketing technology
Now, we all love shiny new toys, but when it comes to marketing technology, it's easy to fall into a money pit. You need to aim to have just enough tech to meet your goals without overcomplicating. Sometimes businesses at your stage may have a system of dozens of disconnected software platforms held together with digital duct tape (like Google Sheet automations that everyone says “don’t touch anything!”). Sometimes they’ll have a single system for email marketing, analytics, CRM, plus accounting and HR but the complexity of the business has outgrown that setup. Whatever it is, it’s important to focus on if the technology works for your business, not if there’s some mythical “better way.”
3. Follow the metrics that matter
In marketing, data is your compass. But not all metrics are created equal. Focus on the ones that genuinely guide you towards revenue and profit. It’s not enough to say “let’s improve the funnel” - you need to decide what is most important right now. It might be the priority is awareness so you’ll focus on metrics like number of website visitors or ad impressions. For most B2B companies, you’ll be focusing on getting leads that convert. If your business is getting leads but deals aren’t closing, you may need to focus on mid-funnel metrics like marketing qualified leads and optimize for that.
Echoing our first point - focus on one thing at a time, learn, then optimize. By zeroing in on the key measures that support the one effort of focus, you can navigate through the fog and find your way to optimize your marketing spend.
4. Ensure marketing and sales are working together
The biggest downside of hiring a marketing team too early is you’ll split your sales and marketing teams. You might think that’s an obvious divide – sales teams make sales and marketers market the product – but it’s all part of one long funnel from awareness to close. If your funnel is split up into two parts there’s no way to establish a strong feedback loop to find the best leads.
When incentives are aligned, marketers will learn from salespeople what makes a high quality lead and fine-tune their offering, and marketers can help salespeople by relaying what messages resonate with leads. By working together, side by side, marketing and sales shift from a cost center to the core of your business’s revenue generation. Getting the right team in place is the best way to get these teams aligned.
5. Get the right kind of help
You’ll never find the perfect hire, the perfect person who is fully left brain and right brained. But businesses at the growth stage desperately need someone with maximum creativity as well as someone numbers driven. Challenges change. New learnings turn to different strategies. That pendulum quickly swings back and forth. A large personality leading a large specialized marketing team can clash with the rest of the organization when adaptations are needed.
At 100 YARDS, we're more than just a stopgap on the road to hiring a marketing team; we're your partners in crafting a marketing strategy that scales with your vision. Whether you're seeking fractional CMO services or a full-service growth marketing team, our expertise is your asset. We grow with you and adapt as you evolve.
Ready to redefine your marketing? Contact us today to explore how we can take your marketing to the next level.
