It’s safe to say that no matter what industry you’re in, the hiring market is a little crazy right now. The top candidates aren’t staying on the market for very long, so this is a big challenge for anyone looking to build their marketing team.
But whether you’re building a team from scratch or just got the green light to boost your headcount, we’ve got some tips for you.
Mark Huber, Head of Brand & Product Marketing, and Jason Widup, VP of Marketing at Metadata, join forces in this episode to share some of the tips and lessons they’ve learned in their journey to build a top marketing team.
You’ll learn why the type of marketing focus should influence your hiring decisions, why you need to hire people better than you, and how to craft the perfect job description.
Watch the full episode to refine your recruitment push and build a world-class marketing team or keep reading to see our top three takeaways from this episode.
Watch the full episode
Here are three key takeaways from this episode:
Three top takeaways:
Takeaway 1: The focus of your marketing should influence the type of team you build
The role of your future marketing team will inform the type of team you build. So, ask yourself, will your team be sales-led? Product-led? Lead focused? Community-centered?
It’s an important question to ask before you start building your team because it gives you a much better idea of what skills you need.
A lot of companies in the B2B space, SaaS companies, in particular, are sales-led to start with. They start with seasoned salespeople as the founding sales members, and they hire more people just like them. There’s nothing wrong with that initially.
However, if you’re more product-led, you might want different types of people on your team because it’s much more of a volume game.
Marketing-led and even community-led teams should look slightly different than sales or product-led teams because of subtle differences in goals and KPIs.
Takeaway 2: Hire people who are better than you
Whether you’re looking to hire your right-hand person in the early days or you’re adding yet another team member to an existing pool, there’s one piece of advice that always fits – hire those who are better than you.
Hiring is as much about self-awareness as anything else. Look at yourself as the leader, and your existing team, and figure out what skills and experiences you have and what’s missing.
Building your team isn’t just about adding numbers. It’s also about filling in the gaps and building a team that can take on anything you throw at it.
If your skills or knowledge fall short in one area, seek out someone who knows way more than you do. If you hire people just like you, then you might as well do the work yourself.
Takeaway 3: There’s no secret formula to hiring agencies vs. full-time workers
There’s no special ratio of contractors vs. full-time employees. It’ll depend on many different things, including a budget, current team members, where you need help, your budget, what the executives above you say, and more.
One thing you can do is figure out which roles and responsibilities are better to outsource than hire a big team. A common one is creative tasks such as graphic design or copywriting. You can easily outsource these things to an agency and save your company from hiring a big team of full-time employees. Whether this becomes a long-term strategy is up to you.
Another way to look at it is to decide what kind of information you want to keep within the organization and which stuff you’re happy to share with external parties. There might be an element of your marketing efforts that you want to keep strictly internal to maintain control over it.
Whatever approach you choose to build your team, think carefully about your overall marketing goals, KPIs, and skills your team already has, and then make your decision with all that in mind.
Next steps
Get the exact questions you should be asking when hiring a demand generation manager in our blog post: 7 Questions You Need To Ask When Hiring a Demand Generation Manager.
Or you can steal our exact job description template so you can hire your next demand gen manager.
