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How to Build an All-Star B2B Marketing Team
55 Plays4 years ago
What are the keys to building a successful marketing team?
Do you hire the best talent or put together a cohesive team that features people with different talents?
"Of course, all-stars," says Mitch Solway, a fractional CMO for startups, who I interviewed for the Marketing Spark podcast. "But all-star doesn't necessarily mean the top talent."
Mitch says one of the keys to success is hiring people focused on the right goals and, as important, people who can fit into the corporate culture.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark with Mitch Solway
00:00:04
Speaker
My name is Mark Evans, and I'd like to welcome you to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers small doses of insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches. By small doses, it's conversations that are 15 minutes or less.
00:00:18
Speaker
On today's show, I'm talking with Mitch Solway. Like myself, Mitch is a fractional CMO. He has led scale ups at Canadian startups, such as Lava Life, Fresh Books, and Vidyard. Mitch works with startups looking to build their marketing teams to succeed and deliver on results.
The Importance of Building Effective Marketing Teams
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark, Mitch. Hey, Mark. Great to be here. So Mitch, you and I discussed a number of topics that we could cover on this episode, and I'm curious about why you wanted to talk about building marketing teams.
00:00:46
Speaker
just a few reasons. One is there's just there's a lot of content and a lot of conversations today about sort of tactical marketing and marketing practices. And that's really good. But one of the questions I get most often that people don't have a lot of context around is when it's time to scale up is how do you actually build a team that is going to be able to deliver on your results. So I'm hoping it's going to be offer some some affection sites and some new thinking for people that are sort of struggling with those questions.
00:01:14
Speaker
It is interesting that there is a fascination right now with tactical execution because I think a lot of companies, particularly B2B companies are scrambling for leads. They believe that if that's going to happen, they have to do something. So it's one of the reasons why you see a lot of content
00:01:31
Speaker
marketing webinars, eBooks, social media activity. But do you think that companies are making a mistake by not taking a step back and looking at what's our strategic focus and how should we structure our marketing team so that we can succeed now?
Scaling Marketing Teams Post Product-Market Fit
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if it's a, it's hard to say it's a mistake because building a good marketing organization, like any good team, it's hard and it's, you know, it's not,
00:01:57
Speaker
something everyone had an opportunity to do and there's always pressure and demands on delivering short-term result. You know what I want to talk today in terms of the port to building a team will help some people take that step back and it's hard. People are stuck in the day-to-day. But if you really want to succeed and sort of get out of that day-to-day grind, you do need to be able to take a step back and think strategically about your long-term growth plan and how you're going to systematically achieve that.
00:02:27
Speaker
So before i get into how you actually help start us maybe you can provide a little bit of context about the kind of companies that you work for how big are they where are they in terms of their growth and why do they call you in. So i'm hearing from companies that really different stages of growth you know if when i choose when i tell people what i do is i say i really want to come in post product market fit and you're now.
00:02:52
Speaker
Maybe you've got a small marketing organization, but the CEO and the marketing team together agree that they're not really sure about how they're going to reach that next level of growth. So you've got product market fit. So it's not like we don't even know what we're doing yet. Probably not the best time to bring me in as a fractional CMO, but we're like, you know, we think we've got something here, but we need to bring in someone that can help us sort of do the heavy lifting that needs to get done to break through to that next level of growth.
00:03:18
Speaker
So is there a secret formula that you use when you're building a marketing team? Have you built the same kind of teams at every company that you work with? Well, there is a secret formula and I can't, I can't hear that today. So it's true. There, there is an approach that I've taken, you know, obviously I've just been a fractional CMO for the last three and a half years for like 25 years before that.
00:03:43
Speaker
I was actually a VP in actual operating VP marketing at a number of startups and built a lot of teams in that capacity. I really learned what it took from a team standpoint to be able to sort of relentlessly deliver more and more and more, which is what marketing needs to do every year within an organization. Those are some of the things I want to share today.
00:04:06
Speaker
Do you have a methodology or an approach that you use to build teams? For example, when you're working with an entrepreneur, do you say to them, okay, here's step one, step two, and step three? Let's say, you know, your, your mandate is you're leading a marketing team and you need to scale up growth. And I'm assuming you're good. You've got money and dollars to invest in building a marketing team. I think it doesn't always go that way. Sometimes you're hiring like one person here, then another person the next year.
00:04:33
Speaker
But I want to talk in the context. A lot of the mandates I've had is let's come in. We want to invest in marketing. We need to put a team together. We need to move forward. We want to scale
Hiring Strategies at Vidyard and FreshBooks
00:04:41
Speaker
up. And there's definitely something that I do on a repeated basis. It's very, very deliberate in terms of making sure that I get the right team in place. And that is start with a plan. I know it sounds like, yeah, yeah, yeah, start with a plan, but it's a three year plan. There's, there's like three major components of that plan. One is.
00:05:02
Speaker
There's alignment with the CEO in terms of where are we today and what do you want marketing to do? What do our outputs need to be? How will we know if marketing is successful? And I want to map that out over three years because if I don't have an aligned understanding with the CEO of their expectations, then I may build the wrong organization that may underachieve our targets or maybe it's way too aggressive for what we need and I've spent way too much money.
00:05:32
Speaker
So it's both in terms of the size and scale of the growth that we want. And then what's the metric or one or two metrics that we need to move? Is it revenue? Is it leads? Is it customers? What are the two or three things that we need to manage against? And then so that's phase number one is getting that alignment. Once I've got that alignment, phase number two is actually building the spreadsheet and the budget in terms of understanding month by month for the next three years,
00:06:01
Speaker
How are those two or one or two metrics going to grow every single month? And obviously then I gotta go, okay, well, what's the plan? What am I actually gonna be delivering as a marketing organization over those next three years? And what do I need to do to make sure that all my numbers roll up to those high level numbers? Now I've got alignment with CEO on targets. I've built out a spreadsheet and a plan that sort of systematically maps how I need to grow
00:06:31
Speaker
And where are those, what are those growth engines going to be? Whether it's content, SEO, social or whatever. And then the third thing that you need to do is you need to understand what I call are these little clusters. Because, um, in terms of scaling up, you kind of want to hire people in little groups and clusters. And I'll give you an example. When I was at Vidyard.
00:06:55
Speaker
You know, we're very early into, uh, into growing this business. And we just recently established ourselves as a video marketing platform. And we knew for, no, nobody even knew what the hell that was. Nobody knew what a video marketing platform, there wasn't a lot of search. It was a new product in the category. People didn't know what to look for. They didn't know what we do. We were going to do. So we really said over the next three years, the two key priorities that we wanted to do were to develop reach.
00:07:24
Speaker
and education. First of all, we wanted to drive customers. We knew with customers, the revenue would come. So we want to focus on new customer acquisitions. We're going to count customers, and not leads, but paying customers. And the strategies to do that, as we said, were reach and educate.
00:07:41
Speaker
We had to tell people, you know, what is it that we do? And we had to educate them on how to use video content. So we mapped that out in terms of on a budget month by month, how that was going to play out and what each, you know, what we're going to do from reach, which is a lot of that was PR and integrations. And then in terms of educate from a marketing standpoint, that was a really key point. We said, you know, we're going to build the world's best blog to learn how to do video marketing to do that.
00:08:10
Speaker
we needed three things. We needed content and we needed social and we needed to have search. You know, one of the first things I would do then is if I know this is what the key elements to grow my volume and my reach and my education is I would then go and hire like those three people that would manage those three things together. They'd manage someone to manage
00:08:35
Speaker
Like to write content, someone to do social promotion of that content, and someone to manage some of the SEO and getting that content placed on different sites, and then to optimize that content for search over time. Because we knew at some point, people were going to start searching for our content. So that's sort of an end-to-end discussion of how we sort of went about things at Vidyard.
00:08:57
Speaker
So you put your plan together, you're aligned with the CEO, which is always important. And then you look at building a team. Now here's an interesting question. What's the balance between building a team and hiring the best talent? Can you have a team of all stars and should you? Now I'm a hockey fan, I'm a hockey player. And when I look at the Toronto Maple Leafs, one of their problems is they have
00:09:19
Speaker
for really, really good players who they pay a lot of money to. And the rest of the team suffers because there's not a lot of the talent isn't spread out. It's all at the very top. So my question is what approach should a company take when it comes to building a team all stars or a group of really good players all around? Well, all stars, of course, but an all star doesn't necessarily mean
00:09:45
Speaker
I'll give you an example. When I was at Fresh Books, we were actually looking to hire someone to manage our whole affiliate program. I had a candidate that was unbelievable. They were the strongest candidate I had interviewed. But I was hesitating because they didn't really align with the values and the culture of the company.
00:10:07
Speaker
They were very, you know, results at all costs driven, right? They would basically do anything to deliver results as part of their makeup and their DNA that made them so strong at what they're doing. But at FreshBooks, we had, there were certain areas where we were willing to not be as aggressive or it wasn't at all costs because we had a brand and a reputation and an image we wanted to convey. And we didn't want to just like trick somebody into converting.
00:10:32
Speaker
There's an example of where there was a top talent, someone who was really the best of the best. But, you know, I remember holding Mike McDermott's hand, he said, just hold my hand as we tell this candidate that we can't hire them. But what we also do is, you know, we, you know, we reached out to some other companies and partners that we knew that were looking for someone that talented. So it's not always the talent. So one area is they may have a talent, but they might not be the fit. And the other part that's really important to remember in terms of top talent or the 18,
00:11:02
Speaker
is remember the first thing I talked about in my plan is aligning to certain metrics and outcomes, is you wanna make sure part of getting top talent is that people, the people that you're hiring, the employees you're hiring, not only are super passionate about the role you're gonna give them, but they totally are motivated by the outcomes that the marketing team needs to deliver. So there's nothing more frustrating than to have somebody maybe really loves their content
00:11:28
Speaker
You know, and they're getting a lot of people to read it, but it's not convert. They're, they're not really incentivized. They're not really motivated by that conversion metric versus somebody that loves to write content. And every time they see somebody converting, they're like, Oh my God, that was amazing. I want to do more like that. Sometimes you want the former, sometimes you want the latter. There's really tricky things, but, but knowing what those metrics and those outcomes need to be when you hire and build your marketing team.
00:11:54
Speaker
It's paramount that the people you hire are naturally motivated and incentivized by the kinds of outcomes that you need your team to deliver. Otherwise, you're just going to struggle and struggle working with someone that's really good at what they do. But at the end of the day, they just can't get behind the kind of metrics and results and outcomes that you need them to deliver.
00:12:15
Speaker
On the flip side, what are some of the pitfalls that companies should avoid when they're building a marketing team?
When to Outsource Marketing Work
00:12:22
Speaker
So what are some of the things that they shouldn't do or the people that they shouldn't hire for that matter? Hiring is a huge conversation.
00:12:28
Speaker
I would say some of the pitfalls and the hardest thing in marketing is when you know you've got a company, when you know you've got a role to fill and you're just not seeing the right candidates and you're like, I'm just going to hire this person because maybe maybe they're good enough. Maybe almost the biggest mistake is just hiring somebody that isn't just going to play at the same level of the rest of your team.
00:12:51
Speaker
Everybody you bring on your team needs to feel like everyone else on the team is not going to bring results down. It's going to play at their level or even raise the bar. And if you bring somebody in that is just not going to perform and contribute at that level, it's got so much negative energy, not just for the rest of your team and for your results, you're really never going to get there. But also for that person, it's really not fair because you kind of know they're not going to deliver.
00:13:19
Speaker
There, you know, eventually it's not going to work out. You're going to have to let them go. And you all have invested so much time and so much negative energy around that, that it's just really not fair to that candidate when maybe there's another scenario that they could step into where they could really do a much better job. Being really patient and being really committed.
00:13:36
Speaker
to building that high performing team that if you get your plan right, you know the exact roles you need to hire for, you know your outcomes, you hire people that are motivated by their outcomes. And then third thing is obviously if they're, what's the culture that you're building your company, making sure that people share those values and they have that culture, whether it's collaboration, teamwork, whatever, that the team's going to work well together and feed off each other.
00:13:58
Speaker
One final question. A lot of companies are looking to outsource some of their marketing. How do freelancers, consultants, and contractors fit into marketing teams? And how do you make sure that your team sees the value of tapping into external expertise?
00:14:14
Speaker
That's a great question. And a lot of companies lost sort of similar question is, you know, what should I insource and what should I outsource? I think part of your plan, again, we'll go back to that three year plan, if you've got these anchor and these tenant capabilities that you're going to need to deliver. So I think the first thing you need to do is you need to hire the right leaders to manage those tenant properties. Like what is the, you know, if we're going to own content, you know, and content is a big part of what we do, you need someone internally that's going to run content and then you need to empower them.
00:14:43
Speaker
With a budget and a mandate and they need to figure out, well, like I probably can't hire three people in order to deliver what I need to do now. I need to go and outsource and basically allow your team to go in, deliver their results, the way that they see fit within their budgets and constraints. And a lot of the times.
00:15:00
Speaker
A lot of times the fastest way to execute and go to market is to use freelance resources because they're available today and they can deliver today. If you want to build a team, you know, you could be out there looking for five, six, seven months to find the right person if you're trying to build that, that amazing team. So using freelance resources that way is probably one of the smartest ways to scale up in the short term and then even discover what you no longer want to freelance and bring in house because you've realized that's become another tenant, tenant property.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:15:29
Speaker
Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review as well as subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Mitch, visit markevans.ca slash blog.
00:15:47
Speaker
If you have questions, feedback, or would like to suggest a guest, send an email to mark at markevans.ca. To learn more about how I help B2B companies as a CMO for hire, consultant and coach, visit markevans.ca. Talk to you next time.