How to hire a startup Head of Marketing w/ Andrus Purde

When hiring, it’s unlikely that you’ll find a candidate equally strong in many areas of marketing. Instead, you should concentrate your hiring efforts on finding a candidate that matches your specific needs.

Ott Niggulis

Marketing is a wide-ranging field consisting of many possible specialisations. From SEO and content creation to analytics, branding and internal communications. 

When hiring, it’s unlikely that you’ll find a candidate equally strong in many of the areas highlighted above. Instead, you should concentrate your hiring efforts on finding a candidate that matches your specific needs.

In this article, we'll zero in on what it takes to be a Head of Marketing in an early-stage SaaS startup.

This article and the accompanying Head of Marketing hiring template is a collaboration between Wisnio and Andrus Purde. 

Andrus has built three marketing teams, hired more than 30 marketers, been hired as the first marketer in a high-growth startup (Pipedrive), spent five years at the marketing team of a global tech company (Skype) and founded a MarTech startup (Outfunnel). In short, he’s been around the block and knows what he's talking about.

Defining a focus area

The three big focus areas of marketing adapted from Andrus Purde.

In a startup, the marketer wears many hats, from product marketing to acquisition and communication. This is normal. The question is about priorities and where the bulk of the marketing resources should go.

In Purde’s experience, in an early-stage SaaS, the focus area is almost always acquisition or delivering qualified leads into the sales pipeline. This does not mean that other areas like branding or product marketing are forgotten. It simply means that the main focus is on delivering qualified leads.

In any case, one of the first jobs of the Head of Marketing is to finish developing a clear product positioning strategy. The startup will have started customer research, competitive analysis, pricing, messaging, positioning, and the like, but the job is to finish those.

Understanding your competition and where you stand is a crucial part of a Head of Marketing job. Everything else builds on that knowledge.

Creating new marketing channels and building up a team

As everything is new and untested, the most important quality or skill to consider when hiring is a provable track record of creating and improving marketing channels. 

It’s unlikely that an early-stage SaaS has figured out all their marketing channels, and thus the experience of testing and building up different channels is a must.

It’s easy to be tempted to start testing different channels to see what sticks, the spaghetti-on-the-wall method, but following a roadmap with milestones, and more importantly, budget constraints is more likely to bring results. 

Thus, the experience of developing and following a roadmap with goals and KPIs is an important attribute.

As the company grows, so does the need for new team members in the marketing function. And the ability to lead a team and hire high-performing marketing specialists is something that should be looked at when hiring.

Things to look out for when interviewing candidates

When interviewing candidates, Purde recommends diving into a candidate's most significant accomplishments in driving acquisition and how their role impacted the outcome.

Great candidates will focus on the clients they attracted and the revenue they helped generate and will pay less attention to metrics like website traffic or engagement with content.

Additionally, in a startup environment with limited resources, working effectively with other functions is paramount. Especially for an acquisition-focused marketing role, it’s vital to cooperate with sales. 

Ask the candidate to describe how they see the collaboration between sales and marketing and what specifically they have done to improve sales performance.

Conclusions

Whenever you’re hiring, whether for a Head of Marketing or any other position, the first thing to consider is understanding your company's needs. The same job title can mean many different things, so the first job is to understand what you need.

In an early-stage SaaS startup, that need is usually acquisition or delivering qualified leads into the sales funnel.

The candidates you consider have to have a background in developing a positioning strategy and following a roadmap with defined goals and KPIs, along with testing new channels and finding traction.

For the complete Head of Marketing hiring template, check out our Template gallery. All our Hiring Templates include everything you need to interview, evaluate, and choose the right candidate.