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.
Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.
Mark Evans: 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 for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches. By small doses, it's conversations that are fifteen minutes or less. 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 LavaLife, FreshBooks, and Vidyard. Mitch works with startups looking to build their marketing teams to succeed and deliver on results. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Mitch.
Mitch Solway: Hey, Mark. Great to be here.
Mark Evans: So, Mitch, you and I discussed a number of topics that we could cover on this episode, and I'm curious about why you want to talk about building marketing teams.
Mitch Solway: There's 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 gonna be offer some some fresh insights and some new thinking for people that are sort of struggling with those questions.
Mark Evans: 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 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?
Mitch Solway: Yeah. I don't know if it's a it's hard to say it's a mistake because building a a good marketing organization like any good team, it's hard. And it's, you know, it's not something everyone's had an opportunity to do, and there's always pressure and demands on delivering short term result. You know, what I wanna talk today in terms of the importance of 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 wanna succeed and and sort of get out of that day to day grind, yeah, you do need to be able to take a step back and think strategically about, you know, your long term growth plan and how you're gonna systematically achieve that.
Mark Evans: So before I get into how you actually help startups, 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?
Mitch Solway: So I'm hearing from companies at really different stages of growth. You know, if when I choose, when I tell people what I do is I say, you know, I really wanna come in post product market fit, and you're now 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 gonna meet 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.
Mark Evans: 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?
Mitch Solway: Well, there is a secret formula and I I can't I can't hear that today.
Mark Evans: Come on. Come on, Mitch.
Mitch Solway: Yeah. So I've 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, twenty five years before that, I was actually a VP, an actual operating VP marketing at a number of startups and and built a lot of teams in that capacity. You know, I I really learned what it took from 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. You those are some of the things that I I I wanted to share today.
Mark Evans: 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 is step one, step two, and step three.
Mitch Solway: 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. And I think it doesn't always go that way. Sometimes you're hiring, like, one person here, then another person the next year. But I wanna talk in the context. A lot of the mandates I've had is let's come in. We wanna invest in marketing. We need to put a team together. We need to move forward. We wanna scale 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 there's alignment with the CEO in terms of where, you know, where are we today and what what do want marketing to do? What do our outputs need to be? How will we know if marketing is successful? And I wanna 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 that may underachieve our targets, or maybe it's way too aggressive for what we need, and I've spent way too much money. 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 we need to move? Is it 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, how are those two or, you know, one or two metrics going to grow every single month? And, obviously, then I gotta go, okay. Well, what am I 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 sort of spreadsheet and a plan that sort of systematically maps where you know, what how I need to grow and where those what are those growth engines gonna be, whether it's content, SEO, social, or whatever. Then the third thing that you need to do is you need to understand what I call are these little clusters. Because in terms of scaling up, you kinda wanna hire people in in little groups and clusters. And and I'll give you an example. When I was at Vidyard, you know, we're very early into, 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. There's a new product in the category. People didn't know what to look for. They didn't know what we do we were gonna do. So we really said over the next three years, the two key priorities that we wanted to do were to develop reach and education. First of we wanted to drive We knew with customers, the revenue would come. So we wanna focus on new customer acquisitions. We're gonna count customers, and not leads, but paying customers. And the strategies to do that, as you said, were reach and educate. 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 gonna play out and what each you know, what we're gonna do from reach, which was a lot of that was PR and integrations. And in terms of educate from a marketing standpoint, that was a really key point. We said, you know, we're going to build the the the world's best blog to learn how to do video marketing. To do that, 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 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, like, to write content, someone to do social promotion of that content, and someone to manage some of the SEO and, you know, getting that content placed on different sites and then to optimize that content for search over time. Because we knew at some point, people are gonna start searching for our content. So that's a sort of an end to end discussion of how how we sort of went about things at Vidyard.
Mark Evans: 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 four 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?
Mitch Solway: Well, all stars, of course. But an all star doesn't necessarily mean the top talent. I'll give you an example. When I was at FreshBooks, we were actually looking to hire someone to manage our whole affiliate program. I had a candidate that was unbelievable. They were so they were the strongest candidate I'd interviewed. But I was hesitating because they didn't really align with the values and the culture of the company. They were very, you know, results at all cost driven. Right? They would basically do anything to deliver results. It was 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 cost because we had a brand reputation and an image we wanted to convey, and we didn't wanna just, like, trick somebody into converting. There's an example of where there was a 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 did 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 of top talent or the the a team 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, you know, maybe, you know, really loves their content, 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 wanna do more like that. Sometimes you want performers, 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, 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 gonna 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.
Mark Evans: On the flip side, what are some of the pitfalls that companies should avoid when they're building a marketing team? So what are some of the things that they shouldn't do or the people that they shouldn't hire for that matter?
Mitch Solway: Hiring is a huge conversation. I would say some of the pitfalls and the hardest thing in marketing is when you know you've got a it's a gaming company. When you know you've got a role to fill and you're just not seeing the right candidates, and you're you're like, I'm just gonna 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. Everybody you bring on your team needs to feel like everyone else on the team is not gonna bring results down. It's gonna play at their level or even raise the bar. And if you bring somebody in that is just not gonna perform and contribute at that level, it's got so much negative energy, not just for the rest of your team and see results. You're really never gonna get there, but also for that person. It's really not fair because you kinda know they're not gonna deliver. They're you know, eventually, it's not gonna work out. You're gonna have to let them go, and you all 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 to building, you know, that 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 the 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 gonna work well together and feed off each other.
Mark Evans: 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?
Mitch Solway: That's a great question, and and a lot of companies will ask 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. You've got these anchor and these tenant capabilities that you're gonna 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 if we're gonna own content, you know, and content is a big part of what we do, you need someone internally that's gonna run content. And then you need to empower them 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 and deliver their results the way they see fit within their budgets and constraints. And a lot of the times 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 wanna 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 freelance or bring in house because you've realized that's become another tenant tenant property.
Mark Evans: 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/blog. If you have questions, feedback, or would like to suggest a guest, send an email to mark@markevans.ca. To learn more about how I help b to b companies as a CMO for hire, consultant, and coach, visit markevans.ca. Talk to you next time.