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How to Hire Your First Startup Marketer
65 Plays5 years ago
Alexis Clarfield-Henry talks about what it's like to be the first marketer at a startup.
After a career in advertising, Alexis joined Unata, which built an e-commerce platform for the grocery business.
Clarfield-Henry says one of the keys to success when hiring your first marketer is a willingness to think about of the box rather than someone who has done it before.
“In terms of who they need to look for, that person needs to be flexible, able to roll with punches, willing to learn new things, willing to test and learn, and pivot."
For more details about Alexis and the podcast, check out the show notes.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Marketing Spark Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
Hi, it's Mark Evans. Welcome to the Marketing Spark podcast, which features small doses of insight from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches. Now, by small doses, it's 15 minutes or less of stories, tools, and tips about marketing success, failures, and lessons learned.
Guest Introduction: Alexis Cottfield-Henry
00:00:20
Speaker
On today's podcast, I'm talking with Alexis Cottfield-Henry. Alexis is a product marketer and writer who helps small businesses carve out their position with strategic thought leadership
Role of the First Marketer in a Startup
00:00:29
Speaker
content. In 2015, Alexis was the first marketer at United
00:00:33
Speaker
While she was there, Yannata grew from 19 to 85 people before it was acquired by Instacart. You've been a startup marketer for quite a while. You've got great experience. And one of the things that I'm curious about to get your perspective on is if you're a startup, what are the keys to hiring your first marketer? What do you need to look for? Who do you need to look for? I think, first of all, I think there's that point in the journey of a startup where they realize, okay, they need to invest in marketing and to bring on that first marketer.
00:01:02
Speaker
And I think for the company in terms of who they need to look for, that person is going to need to be very flexible, able to roll with the punches, willing to try new things, willing to test and learn and pivot.
00:01:17
Speaker
So I think there might be the attitude of having to find someone who's done this before. I think that companies should be willing to broaden their scope of what that person could look like in terms of their exact experience and just make sure their personality traits of being open to explore, to try new things, and to work fast and to work smart are really important personality traits for that first
Challenges for Startup Marketers
00:01:43
Speaker
marketer.
00:01:43
Speaker
You're a startup that we're gonna do this we're gonna hire a marketer and you've been that person when you were at yanata You were the first marketer once you arrive where you start because in many respects you're probably starting from scratch There may not be a lot of marketing going on if any at all. This is a good question I think I think it's really exciting to be the first marketer and it certainly was for me and there's so much opportunity that comes along that you get to work alongside the exact team you get to actually have a
00:02:12
Speaker
input into the direction of the company and the product and there's an opportunity to build your own team and department and there's going to be a lot of challenges as the first marketer. Challenges that come along with the team has probably been waiting for you for a while. It does take time for companies to make that investment and make that higher and by the time they find you and you come on board there's going to be a long list of things they want to do.
00:02:38
Speaker
And the likely that list is comprised of things they've seen their competitors doing, things they've seen their peers doing, and not necessarily thought of as part of a holistic plan. I think coming into that scenario of a lot of expectation of doing things fast and all these things that they have lined up,
00:02:57
Speaker
is going to be a challenge. And having a lot of different stakeholders to balance who all have those ideas for you and are coming to you directly is going to be a challenge. And I think working with probably a very small budget in most cases will be a challenge.
Balancing Stakeholder Expectations
00:03:14
Speaker
Right, so let's run with this dating versus marriage analogy. So when you first get into a relationship, both sides are really excited. The expectations are sky high. The question is, as the first marketer, how do you manage expectations? Because as you say, they probably want you to do a lot and they want you to do it quickly. So what are the keys to setting yourself up for success?
00:03:36
Speaker
I think it's really about a balance of taking the time up front to learn as much as you can and to put together a plan. I'll talk about that plan in a second. But taking that time up front and resisting the urge to just run with all the ideas that everyone has and reminding yourself that you are coming in as the marketing expert. So there is merit to putting that thought behind it and looking at things holistically. But at the same time,
00:04:04
Speaker
I really recommend that you start putting work out because people have been waiting for you and they want to see your work and they want to see your value.
00:04:14
Speaker
So you could do things like start or pick up the company newsletter that's going out to your prospects or your customers every month, every two weeks and start running with that. Start getting some blog posts out. These are easy wins that you can quickly pick up where things are at with the product and the market and start getting creative work out there and start getting the brand and the company out there.
00:04:40
Speaker
while buying yourself enough time to think strategically about the whole picture and what marketing can look like over the next three, six, 12 months, given priorities of the business, given the fact that you're probably going to be the only marketing resource for a while.
00:04:55
Speaker
And given the fact that you're going to have to bootstrap, there's probably very little budget. And so while everybody wants the moon and the stars and universe, you are going to have to prioritize given those constraints. And you want to have the time to understand the market, the customer, the product.
00:05:14
Speaker
in and out and the goals of the company so that you can thoughtfully put that plan forward to the team.
Lessons Learned from Early Marketing Mistakes
00:05:20
Speaker
What did you do at Unata? You get there, you're the first marker. How did you prove or validate the fact that they made the right decision? What did you do exactly to get some momentum? I think it wasn't the smoothest of starts for me. I think that I came in with
00:05:36
Speaker
Background at advertising agency so this is my first tech company and my first time moving from the agency side to the marketing side or what we like to call the client side i did the sort of lessons i'm giving here lessons definitely that i learned the hard way and an example of that is. One of the things i walked into everybody wanted social they wanted to build their social channels up they wanted to.
00:05:58
Speaker
create presence on social, and coming from advertising in a consumer-facing world, I was on board. I loved social. I'd seen quite a bit of impact that we'd made on the advertising side with social. So I ran with that. I spent a lot of time building up our channels.
00:06:14
Speaker
and building content for our channels to share and curating content. And it was clear after a few months that while this is maybe good in some ways, it wasn't resulting in new leads. It wasn't resulting in new customers. And so what we realized together as a team is that our customers weren't spending time on these channels in relation to finding an e-commerce platform, e-commerce provider. And this isn't where they were going to be
00:06:43
Speaker
taking decisions on that stuff. And sometimes on some of the channels they don't even want to see work-related items in that way. So I think I focused a lot of my plan on basing it on what some of the folks internally thought they wanted, rather than taking more of that holistic picture.
00:07:01
Speaker
on the time to plan and understand things. So it was more in my like three to six month mark where I had had more time to learn things that I could prove myself a little bit better. Yeah, I think those first three months were a little bit like I wouldn't have wanted them to go that way if I could do it again. But the team was super supportive. And I think one thing that kept them excited about me was the content that I was creating.
00:07:24
Speaker
And aside from social, we had huge thought leadership pieces and I got my blog going, got their blog going. I think that really helped prove out my role for the time being until I learned the landscape a little bit better. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense. I mean the reality is that they must have been excited but then to be disappointed. But when I think about it, that's a pretty intimidating position to be in because you're the new hire
00:07:53
Speaker
They're excited about you pursuing a particular marketing activity and it's hard to say no. It's hard to say to key stakeholders, no, I think that's the wrong thing to do. We should do this instead.
Strategic Planning vs. Tactical Execution
00:08:06
Speaker
How would you have done things differently if you had to do it all over again? I think that if I could do it again, I probably wouldn't have said no. I think that there is, I could have balanced my time a bit better.
00:08:17
Speaker
So trying that out and at the same time trying a few other things out. And it did. There were a couple of things happening at once, but I definitely over indexed on the social. I think there is also a spirit in every startup of test and learn. I was lucky at Unite. I think the exec team had that spirit and they were like, we're all trying things here. We're all trying things.
00:08:38
Speaker
That's okay if we don't get it right the first time and because they had that attitude it wasn't it wasn't a huge disappointment I think where We really bonded as a team was the fact that we could all look at that together and say let's this doesn't work We tried it. This is fine. Let's try something else right and so I don't regret trying it I don't regret
00:08:58
Speaker
is something they really want going for it and coming to that decision that isn't the right avenue for our customer. However, if I could have spent a little less time on it, I think that would have been better to kick off our marketing overall.
00:09:13
Speaker
if I had more time for some other things. It's a great example of a lesson learned and I think this is particularly relevant for less experienced marketers who may not have the gravitas or even the confidence to engage in a discussion where they may not agree with their boss. The other thing you mentioned is the combination of strategy and tactics because you're a one-man band or a one-woman band
00:09:38
Speaker
You've got to do both. So how do you balance? How do you balance between sort of setting the plan, putting everything in motion, and then actually having to tactically execute? It's not that easy, but it's a must, this balance. And you can't overextend in one area or the other for too long. So I think what I said about, especially at the beginning, starting to get those small tactical pieces out upfront,
00:10:05
Speaker
while you take time with the strategy so in that case you know you would you would want to lean more heavily into the strategy area at the start of every quarter and just make sure that there's still work going out at the same time the things just can't pause right that's not okay you've got to keep getting your brand out there and keep doing activities that are going to bring you
00:10:27
Speaker
leads to your sales team and whatever your goals are. But there are times in the year that you are going to have to do more strategy and less execution. At the very beginning, I think it's those quick wins. And then when you come to quarterly and annual planning, you want to set yourself up to have some things going out that don't need a lot of work for you. So that can be an email flow that you set up ahead of time.
00:10:48
Speaker
pre-write a bunch of your newsletters, pre-write a bunch of your blogs and get them set up to go out on certain dates so that you can carve out that space for that strategy work. And then there's going to be times where you take a break and you're really running with your plan and just have to make sure that you're measuring things and how they're going and stop, look and measure and steer the ship the other way if you have to.
00:11:11
Speaker
It's just a constant balance and you're going to lean to one or the other different times. You just have to make sure you don't forget about one or the other.
Wise Budget Allocation in Marketing
00:11:18
Speaker
Let's talk money. A key part of any relationship is money and hopefully you don't disagree over money. But when you're a startup marketer, obviously money is a big factor. Some startups, especially for venture backed, you got lots of money for marketing and many startups have no money for marketing. So how do you determine a budget and maybe walk through
00:11:37
Speaker
how you did that at Unata, how you figured out like, here's how much money I have, here's where we need to spend it, here's how I can prove them in spending my money in the right way. Budget is, yeah, it's always a tricky one, and there are definitely going to be hard conversations around budget. My approach with budget at Unata changed over the years, and I think that's natural.
00:12:00
Speaker
When I arrived, there was budget earmarked for my role, and there were some ideas of where that money should go already before I started. Even when you think you have a lot of budget, when you actually figure out all the activities you want to do, it tends to disappear very quickly. One of the things that was earmarked for the budget that was given to me was conferences, attending and having a booth at conferences. So that budget disappears very quickly.
00:12:24
Speaker
It's very expensive isn't it? Very expensive. But this is one of those things that the team had been very eager to try. They had been walking the floors at conferences for years and they were excited to actually finally have a booth and have a present. So I was keen to make that happen for them. This is something over the years we actually
00:12:40
Speaker
we sort of stopped doing as much because it wasn't proving its return on investment as much as the team had hoped. Because they're expensive, you have to see a lot of return coming from them, whether that's in the form of leads, new customers, hopefully. So that was one thing we tried and over the years we sort of brought that cost down to and attended fewer and fewer conferences.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah and listen they're not, it's not, it's still a good thing to be involved with. What we did is, so conferences for us, let's just talk about United as the example, our sales cycle is very long, you know, 6 to 18 months. So we might have met a prospect at a conference that didn't turn into a customer for a year. So our conference, the way we would measure conferences was really like at the start of the year. What happened last year, which ones did we go to and which
00:13:30
Speaker
events do we get customers from and so if we went to six and we pinpointed, we only got customers for two. Next year we just went to those two conferences. We were really really leaning on the measurement of and for us like our customers were bigger our annual contract values are bigger than say a regular SaaS company because we're enterprise focused so we could justify one customer from one event and we would cover a cost there and more so we were
00:13:57
Speaker
in a position that was very like one to one measurement.
Bootstrapping and Outsourcing for Startups
00:14:01
Speaker
You can do that with cost per leads and cost per customers. It just sometimes takes time to measure. Let's talk with the other extreme. You're a startup marketer, you arrive at your new job and you've got very little budget. Essentially, you got to build a marketing engine from scratch, but you really haven't got a lot of cash to make that happen. What would you do? What kind of things would you implement to actually get some marketing momentum?
00:14:26
Speaker
You're going to have to bootstrap for a bit. I remember at Unata I was writing e-books and infographics and then designing them with pages. I'm not a designer, but we didn't have money yet for a designer. There is a magic bootstrapping that has to go on.
00:14:42
Speaker
But I highly recommend you figure out, as the first marketer, what can you do and what can you learn and what can you not do and will not be able to do. So for me, that was designing. That was, okay, I can figure this out for the first field, but if we want to be a brand that looks bigger than we are, I can't be designing infographics. So I recommend for the first marketer, figure out what you can do, what you can learn to do in a reasonable amount of time.
00:15:06
Speaker
And everything else, you really need to make the case. If that's hiring a freelancer, if that's marketing tech that you need to use to get the job done, go out and make the case and break it down for your company based on cost per lead, based on cost per customer. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you have questions, feedback, or like to suggest a guest, send an email to mark at markevans.ca. See you next time.