How to Find Marketing Talent for Hyper-Growth SaaS Companies

Mike and Erica discuss the challenges and opportunities of building marketing teams at a hyper-growth company.

Expanding from 65 to 500 people. Onboarding 50 new hires per quarter. Growing 50% YoY, A marketing team that’s getting bigger and stronger each quarter – if that’s not hypergrowth, then we don’t know what is!

We talk about how the role of a marketing leader grows and changes as the company grows, and some of the challenges with hiring ahead of plan, based on Mike’s experiences at Coveo.

We also talk about the need to balance ‘scrappy’ and ‘scale’ in a hyper-growth environment. For example, would you as a CEO hire a CMO who needed to ‘stoop’ into the role (someone coming from a much larger firm that has already done a big revenue climb) or ‘stretch’ into the role (someone who has not yet been the top marketer, or who comes from a smaller firm)?

Mike offers 3 tips for anyone taking on a marketing leadership role in a hyper growth company:

- Bring data to every marketing conversation, including data from existing marketing programs and data from across the company - to make themselves more credible to the leadership team.

- Build a culture where people expect change. Embrace change, but also build a strong vision for what you are trying to achieve as a marketing team, along with a strong set of shared values.

- "Hire people that scare you a little.”

In our organizational design segment, Erica and Mike speak about specific org structure changes that Mike helped make to marketing at Coveo. He shares two - about centralizing shared services between customer acquisition and product marketing; as well as building collaborative crews who don’t have a hierarchical responsibility to each other but work together on various time-bound or ongoing business initiatives.

Finally, our last segment takes on trends that will impact marketing leadership in B2B SaaS companies for 2020. Here are some that stood out:

1. CRO titles and how that’s going to impact the marketing org structure in high growth enterprises

2. Marketers mastering data for real revenue outcomes

3. More intentional role design for marketing leaders

4. Putting content marketing on a diet

5. The need for B2B SaaS marketing leaders to talk PE

What do you think? What trends will impact the role of the B2B SaaS CMO in 2020 and beyond?

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy