Marketers, Founders and Boards, oh my!
When Three's a Crowd not Three's Company
Hello content friends!
This week’s op-ed harkens back to Episode 2: What Founders/CEOs Are Getting Wrong When Hiring and Managing Marketers. I invited my old boss, Suneet Bhatt to chime in, because he’s encountered this star-crossed threesome throughout his career and gave me a lot of advice on how to manage it when I worked for him.
It’s complicated: The crowded relationship between Marketers, Founders/CEOs, and The Board.
Suneet is the founder of My Authentic Story, where he helps professionals, students, and anyone who’s curious “Unearth, frame, share and live their purpose” (learn more). He’s adapted his framework and approach to a course titled “Find and Evolve your Purpose” he now teaches at Rutgers University.
Before My Authentic Story, Suneet spent 25 years working across sectors and business models while participating in various company transformations and transactions, from raising over $40mm, to operating as Board Chair and President for the world’s largest B-Corp Certified BPO, to the purchase/sale of companies totaling over $100mm.
Suneet learned throughout his career that people are the most sustainable, adaptable, valuable, and important drivers of everything you do. So take care of them.
He currently serves on the Board of Education for Metuchen, NJ, and writes socially impactful children’s books (Dream Village).
What gets founders “here” doesn’t always get them a functioning marketing team
When you’re hiring for roles you’re not an expert in, you need help. Founders/CEOs can go to their boards, founder friends, community and other inputs for advice. If you're going to the board and they give you bad advice, then you're going to go in thinking you've got the right thing. So inputs are crucially important and how to learn to understand marketing better through the person you're hiring (which requires building trust).
The challenges founders face when parsing this advice originates with what makes a founder a founder in the first place.
Founders have gotten to a place of success (manifesting an idea, building an idea, turning the idea into a business) by taking up a torch for and carrying the mantle of an idea that the world hasn't manifested on its own yet. They’ve built a business in a space that many have dismissed and others have said wasn’t possible. If they didn’t think they were unique and if they weren’t stubborn self-believers in the face of criticism and feedback, we’d never have new things. I always acknowledged this fact with every founder I worked with. They were the genius behind the idea.
Founders are who and where they are specifically, because they did what everyone else told them they shouldn't do or couldn't be done. They have to fundamentally believe in the decision and the approach to the decision they’re taking on the heels of that advice.
Next, founders - more than CEOs who have joined a company after inception - hit various points of friction in onboarding their leadership team.
Having a product founder hand the reins to a product leader is hard.
Having a founding partner who is the original technologist hand off the reins to a VP of Engineering is hard.
So the founder’s dynamics across the company are fraught. It's the nature of the role and these issues are not just with Marketing.
Founders should look to where they’ve had success in similar decisions in the past and where their decisions led to more conflict or lack of progress. Understanding the framework behind those decisions can raise the bar of success and maintain it over time.
When founders make executive-level hiring decisions, they have to be honest with themselves about (1) what the company actually needs (not titles, but functions and capabilities), (2) what they’re willing to cede (not just functions and capabilities, but authority, decision-making, and ownership of metrics).
Founders need to be clear on who they are bringing on, in what capacity, to operate in the space between them and the company. And founders have to believe in the role, the process, and then the hire. Don’t be cavalier about what you’ll be willing to give up, where you’ll be willing to step back – be truthful and honest.
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Ultimately, Founders are the parents and the company is the kid. Your job as an employee is to figure out where you fit in that dynamic.
Let me put it in context. I’ve been hired by a number of founders who tell me I’m an owner and to act like an owner – in a sense, they tell me I'm a parent too. That has usually not been the case.
In many cases, the founders I worked with weren’t ready for me to be more than a teacher - to have a responsibility for their child in a very specific capacity in a very specific context for a very specific purpose. They hired me in as a parent, or a nanny, but really wanted me to behave like a teacher.
The biggest challenge and therefore the biggest opportunity to get this right, is expectation management: when the founder has one expectation for your role in that child's life and you have a different objective. The noise, more often than not, is a founder knowing they need to bring on a nanny, but they're not really ready or prepared for more than a teacher.
(As an aside: the times I felt most like an owner were when we were in a state of crisis: being hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, COVID, realizing we had a massive churn problem that was being masked by reporting, etc. I’ve been best at helping others find their place and helping founders identify who and what they needed in that space.)
On the being the first marketing hire and the need for executive alignment
I have failed as the first marketing hire more times than you can imagine. The marketing (revenue, sales, customer) teams I built were always exceptional. I'd say transformational. We’ve been pioneers or on the cutting edge of many GTM strategies and principles. But I failed, because I didn't realize that more than half of my job was actually leading the founder through a change management exercise. I didn't spend enough time on that and I didn't honor the founders the way I should have in their role and in the ultimate humility of my own. And so, for the performance and transformations we enabled, I never found a real home.
As a leader, there are three categories of directives you can issue:
What
How
When
The more junior the person, the more directives you can issue simultaneously. A new front line employee? You can tell them what, how and when to do something.
A CMO? You can tell them one of those three. You need to trust them to come back with the other two.
Unless a founder is willing to embrace that dynamic, they don't want a CMO. They want a Head of Product Marketing or Demand Gen.
Being the “first” hire of a particular sort can be exhausting. You’re responsible for a lot of change and transformation. When a Founder looks to hire a CMO they’re usually 6 months behind where they need to be. Which is why whenever I joined I always started from the point of maximum impact and work backwards in both directions (up and down the funnel). I’ve helped shepherd a lot of change but I’ve burned a lot of capital, goodwill, and personal health/energy when doing so. On this point, folks can learn way more from my mistakes than my successes which is why I share this (and everything here) so transparently.
Interviewing for marketing roles - getting what you want - as a founder and marketing hire
The biggest challenge for founders is understanding what they want their marketer to do. The mandates I've been given at companies are extraordinary and broad. Even more powerful are the constraints (for example: you run Marketing, are responsible for driving leads and trials, but you don’t have your own design team and everything you want to launch has to go through product).
What I advise marketers on before accepting a job is to be very clear on what the expectations are; but then going deeper on things like values, constraints -- hell, do a RAPID or RACI before you accept. More than any other team, decision-making frameworks matter most in Marketing (Growth), mostly because this is the area where they are used least (I’ve rarely had trouble implementing decision-making frameworks between product and engineering, or between customer success and sales, etc).
Scaling founder-led sales → creating your first marketing program
Moving from founder-led sales once you start to see enough, consistency, you can start to scale it and marketing is sales at scale. Right?
When founders think about setting up a marketing program from zero, do they understand the type of marketer you need to execute on that opportunity Is the founder willing to let go and what are they willing to let go of?
At a company, most people (aside from marketers) believe that Marketing is the only thing you can change right now.
You can fix the website RIGHT NOW.
You can launch an ad campaign RIGHT NOW.
You can spin up a landing page RIGHT NOW.
But need an update to the product? Well, put that in the queue, we'll score and prioritize it, and then get back to you with a date.
I have always pushed for more respect for Marketing and when it's worked well is when Product and Founder teams have acknowledged that Marketing needs time to push things live. I love the distinction between “Code Complete”, “Customer Ready” and “Customer Delivered”. When founders have said: "Ok, the product is ready! Now go nail how we're going to bring it to market," that’s the marketing team did its best work.
If I were a founder, I wouldn't hire a senior-level marketer until I worked with them. So: bring one on your Board. Bring one on as an advisor and consultant. Learn about the role and what they do. Use that to inform your hire. Try before you buy. And then, be clear about the role.
A big challenge I had was coming in as a CMO then having the founder find a new marketing-related board member, because it set up conflict and tension.
Probably my biggest friction as CMO, but the reason I've had tangible success, is to stay focused on aligning the team, monitoring the data and moving the business forward unemotionally.
I remember following one of the HubSpot celebrities at a conference; the individual said "there’s no more easy marketing" and talked about the saturation of email/ads/etc.
The answer really is: The easiest marketing is right in front of you: pay attention to who's paying attention to you. Prospects, trialers, customers. Start by paying attention to who’s paying attention to you, and then create experiences that capture more of that attention. As you hit momentum, work from the inside out – from the point of conversion out in either direction.