How to Hire Your First Startup Marketer

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Mark Evans: 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 fifteen minutes or less of stories, tools, and tips about marketing success, failures, and lessons learned. On today's podcast, I'm talking with Alexis Caulfield Henry. Alexis is a product marketer and writer who helps small businesses carve out their position with strategic thought leadership content. In 2015, Alexis was the first marketer at Unata. While she was there, Unata 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?

Alexis Caulfield Henry: I think first of all, I think there's that that point in the journey of a start up where they realize, okay, they need to invest in marketing and to bring on that first marketer. And I think for for the company in terms of who they need to look for, that person is 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. 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 their scope of of what that person could look like in terms of their exact experience and just make sure their personality is 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 marketer.

Mark Evans: You're a startup that said, we're gonna do this. We're gonna hire a marketer. And you've been that person when you were at Unata, you were the first marketer. Once you arrive, where do 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.

Alexis Caulfield Henry: 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 exec team. You get to actually have input into the direction of the company and the product, and there's an opportunity to build your own team department. And there's a there's gonna be a lot of challenges as the first marketer. Challenges that, you know, 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 hire. And by the time they find you and you come on board, there's gonna be a long list of things they wanna do. And 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 is going to be a challenge. And having, you know, a lot of different stakeholders to balance who all have those ideas for you and are coming to you directly is gonna be a challenge. And I think working with probably a very small budget in most cases will be a challenge.

Mark Evans: Right. So if you're let's let's 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 an, as the first marketer, how do you manage expectations? Cause as you say, they probably want you to do a lot and they want you to do it quickly. So what are keys to setting yourself up for success?

Alexis Caulfield Henry: I think it's really about a balance of taking the time upfront to learn as much as you can and to put together a plan. And I'll talk about that plan in a second. But taking that time upfront and resisting the urge to just run with what all the ideas that everyone that everyone has and reminding yourself that, you know, 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, 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. So you could do things like start or pick up the company newsletter that's, you know, going out to your prospects or your customers every month, every every two weeks, and start running with that. Start getting some blog posts out. These are easy wins that, you know, you can quickly pick up the where things are at with the product in the market and start getting creative work out there, start getting the brand and start getting the brand and the company out there while buying yourself enough time to think strategically about the whole picture and what marketing can look like over the next three, six, twelve months given priorities of the business, given the fact that you're probably gonna be the only marketing resource for a while, and given the fact that you're gonna have to bootstrap. There's probably very little budget. And so while everybody wants the moon and the stars and the universe, you are gonna have to prioritize given those constraints, and you're you wanna have the time to understand the market, the customer, the product in and out, so you and the goals of the company so that you can thoughtfully put that plan forward to the team.

Mark Evans: So what did you do at Unata? So you get there. You're the first marketer. Like, how did you prove or validate the fact that they made the right decision? And what did you do exactly to get some momentum?

Alexis Caulfield Henry: So I I think it was a it wasn't the smoothest of starts for me. I I think that I came in with background at advertising agencies. So this was 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 are lessons definitely that I learned the hard way, and an example of that is one of the things I walked into is everybody wanted social. They wanted to build their social channels up. They wanted to create presence on social. And coming from advertising in in a, you know, consumer facing world, I was I was on board. I loved social. I'd seen quite a bit of impact that we've made on the advertising side with social. So I ran with that. I spent a lot of time building up our channels and building content for our channels to share and curating content, and it was clear after a few few months that while this is, you know, 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 ecommerce platform, ecommerce provider. And this isn't where they were gonna be taking decisions on that stuff. And even some sometimes they don't and some of the channels, they don't even wanna see work related items in that way. So I think I had focused a lot of my plan on basing basing it on what some of the folks internally thought they wanted rather than taking more of a that holistic picture and 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. And aside from social, we had huge thought leadership pieces and, you know, I got my blog going, got their blog going. I think that really helped prove out my role for the time being until until I learned the landscape a little bit better.

Mark Evans: Right.

Alexis Caulfield Henry: Does that make sense?

Mark Evans: Yeah. It makes sense. I mean, I mean, the reality is is that they must have been just must have been excited, but then to be disappointed. And but, know, when I think about it, that's pretty and a pretty intimidating position to be in because you're the new hire. They're excited about you pursuing a particular marketing activity and and it's hard to say no. I mean, it's hard to say to key stakeholders, no, I think that's the wrong thing to do. We should do this instead. How would you have done things differently if you had to do it all over again?

Alexis Caulfield Henry: 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. So trying that out and at the same time trying a few other things out. And and it did. There were there were a couple of things happening at once, but I I definitely over indexed on the social. I think there's also a spirit in every startup of test and learn. I was lucky at United. I think the exec team had that spirit, and it's you know, they were like, we're all trying things here. We're all trying things, so 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 is didn't work. We tried it. This is fine. Let's try something else. Right. So I don't regret trying it. I don't regret this is something that 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 for, you know, to kick off our marketing overall if I had more time for some other things.

Mark Evans: Yeah. I mean, it's a great example of a lesson learned, I think this is particularly relevant for less experienced marketers who may not have the gravitas or even the confidence to to engage in a in a discussion where they may not agree with with their with your boss. The other thing you mentioned is is the combination of strategy and tactics because you're a one man band or a one woman band. You've got to, you've got to do both. So how do you, how do you balance? How do you balance between sort of setting the plan, putting everything in motion, and and then actually having to tactically execute?

Alexis Caulfield Henry: It's not 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, you know, what I said about, especially at the beginning, starting to get those small tactical pieces out upfront while you take time with the strategy. So in that case, you know, you would you would wanna lean more heavily into the strategy area upfront at the start of every quarter, and just make sure that there's still work going out at the same time because the things just can't pause. Right? That's that's not okay. You've gotta keep getting your brand out there and keep doing activities that are going to bring leads to your sales team and and whatever your your goals are. But there are times in the year that you are gonna have to to do more strategy and less execution. At the very beginning, I think it's those quick wins. And then when you come quarterly and annual planning, you want to set yourself up to have some things going out that don't need a lot of work from you. So that could be, you know, an email flow that you set up ahead of time, pre write a bunch of your newsletters, pre write a bunch of your blogs, and and get them set up to go out on on certain dates and so that you can carve out that space for that strategy work. And then there's gonna be times where, you know, 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 steer the ship the other way if you have to. So just a constant balance and you're gonna lean to one or the other different times. You just have to make sure you don't forget about one or the other.

Mark Evans: 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, you know, especially for venture backed, you got you got lots of money for marketing and many startups have no money for marketing. So so how do you do different a budget and maybe talk, walk through how you did that at United, 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 and spending my money in the right way.

Alexis Caulfield Henry: Budget is yeah. It's always a a tricky one, and there are definitely going to be hard conversations around budget. My approach with budget at United changed over over the years, and I think that's natural. 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 wanna do, it it tends to disappear very quickly. One of the things that was earmarked for the budget that was given to me were was conferences, attending and having a booth at conferences. So that budget disappears very quickly.

Mark Evans: Yeah. It's very expensive, isn't it?

Alexis Caulfield Henry: Very expensive. But this is one of those things that, you know, the team had been very eager to try. They had been walking the floors at conferences for years, and it's they were excited to actually finally have a booth and have a present. So I was I was keen to make that happen for them. This is something over the years we actually we sort of stopped doing as much because there it wasn't proving its return on investment as much as the team had hoped. You have to 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, you know, we tried. And over the years, we sort of brought that cost down to and attended fewer and fewer conferences. Yeah. And 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 an example. Our sales cycle is very long, you know, six to eighteen 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 did we go to? And which events did we get customers from? And so if we went to six and we pinpointed, we only got customers for two. The next year, we just went to those two conferences. So we were really, really leaning on the measurement of and for us, like, our customers were, you know, bigger our annual con 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 we would cover a cost there and more. So we were in a position that that was very like one to one measurement. You can do that with cost per leads and cost per customers. It just sometimes takes time to measure.

Mark Evans: Let's talk about the other other extreme. You're a startup marketer, you arrive at your new job and you've got very little budget. Essentially, you gotta build a marketing engine from scratch, but you really haven't got a lot of cash to make that happen. What would you do? Like what what kind of things would would you implement to actually get some marketing momentum?

Alexis Caulfield Henry: You're gonna have to bootstrap for a bit. And so, I mean, I remember at Unata, I was writing ebooks and infographics and then designing them with pages. I'm not a designer, but we didn't have money yet for a designer. So there's there is a an amount of bootstrapping that has to go on. 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 could let's I can figure this out for the first few, but if we wanna 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, and everything else you really need to make the case if that is if that's hiring a freelancer, if that's marketing tech that you need to use to get the job done. Go ahead and make the case and break it down for your company based on cost per lead, based on cost per customer.

Mark Evans: 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@markevans.ca. See you next time.