How to build a winning SaaS marketing team with Kathleen Estreich (Part 3 of 3)
Adding value and asking the right questions as a startup advisor/board member
This is the final part of my conversation with Kathleen Estreich of MKT1 about building SaaS marketing teams as a founder. Read parts 1 and 2 here and here which includes Kathleen’s guidance on how hiring, setting teams up for success, and setting marketing goals.
Kathleen shared great advice for start up advisors and board members on how they can add value as a company is building out their marketing organization.
Send this part to your board. What board members should be asking marketers
Lyndsay In those early days as a new hire is ramping, what are good questions I can ask as a board member or advisor? And the bad questions I should avoid?
Kathleen The first board meeting for any marketer depends on how long they've been there. I almost think of the first one as an introduction. What have you learned? What do you see as the big opportunities here? What are the things you think we've done well? What are the areas of opportunity? Get their feedback with fresh eyes.
In terms of KPIs, marketers should present baseline numbers, but they might not have moved any of the metrics yet. Basic tracking is sometimes not there. They should have at least whatever metrics they have, whatever observations they've made. What's working, what's not, what are the big opportunities and then their plan for go forward.
Your job as a board member is to hold them accountable to the plan going forward. For the first board meeting, they probably haven't been there long enough to meaningfully move the metrics that you're looking for. Do they have baselines? Do they have a sense of what been working, what hasn't, what are the big opportunities? And do they have a plan for like the big rocks or big bets that they want to make.
Lyndsay And the bad questions or mistakes? Be honest with me!
Kathleen The mistake board members can make is expecting that marketing is here and our growth is just going to go up and to the right the second they join. There's usually some foundational stuff that needs to be done. I think you as a board member want to understand the foundational stuff and the timeline for progress so that you can then see when you can expect to see the impact of the marketer.
Lyndsay Makes sense, so the wrong question would be asking for metrics really early.
Kathleen Yes, the numbers change within the first 3 to 4 months of someone being in there. They haven't been there long enough to do anything meaningful, change the trajectory. But what you should be looking for are what metrics are we tracking and are we tracking things so that we can understand what are our baselines? In subsequent meetings, you should be checking in to see if those numbers are growing.
You should ask: what numbers are you tracking? What were the baselines? What are the big bets that you think we should be making from a marketing perspective? And then what do you need from us as a board?
Lyndsay Same question, how about a year in?
Kathleen I think even six months in you should be seeing some progress. A lot of board members think they know more. So, yeah, I think that can be challenging for the marketing leader.
Bad questions are getting into the weeds of the tactics. I would focus on the strategy and the goals and the big rocks or big bets that the team is making. I think board members get way too into the tactics sometimes.
Lyndsay For example, did you pick HubSpot or Salesforce, those types of questions?
Kathleen Those things are not relevant. Make sure that you as a board member have confidence in the overall strategy and focus. But sometimes it's way too minute that it's not useful. The other thing that from a board member can be somewhat challenging for a marketing leader is, oh, I saw this company tried this. You should try this. Maybe that strategy will work for us or maybe it won't. I think trying to dictate too much of the marketing strategy can be frustrating for the marketing leader.
Marketing is one of those things where it's so accessible, everyone thinks they're a marketer. It's the same challenge marketers have. Within an organization everyone thinks that they can and should weigh in on stuff and it's good to get feedback. I'm not saying it's not, but I think you want to be careful not to try to be too prescriptive and focus instead on the top line goals you’re trying to achieve. Not the how we're going to get there and the day-to-day tactics that the marketing marketers should do.
Focus, it's the advice we give to the marketer. Focus on the impact, not the activities that should go into it.
Lyndsay Any other good questions, ones that you would be happy if somebody asked you about in the board meeting?
Kathleen Caring about some of the operational stuff that the team is doing is helpful. Because in the early days it is important. The foundation building for the marketing team, whether it's tools process or team building, hiring, those things are important. Asking not just about the KPI type stuff, also asking what experiments you’ve tried in the last quarter? And what did you learn?
Lyndsay Yeah, really shining a light on all of those things that they're doing that might take some time to pay off.
For the last one, anything you think is really important about this topic that we haven't hit on?
Kathleen For founders in particular, it's important to think about building a well-balanced marketing team. We meet a lot of founders who say that they just need to hire a growth marketer or a product marketer. You need to really think about the fuel and the engine when you're building your marketing team. That is one of the most important things that founders should really think about because as you're growing the team, keeping that balance intact is also important.
With each hire, you need to reevaluate where they are strong, where the weakness is. The other thing that's important is most early marketing leaders are going to be more generalists than specialists. You can supplement with contractors some of the very specialized parts of marketing like SEO, PR, you can outsource some content writing. There are areas that you can hire contractors for that are very specialized versus having your first couple hires be very specialized because you want that flexibility.
If things change, you need people who are more broad than deep so that you can continue to experiment to figure out what's going to work.
Every job description is ten times more than what's written. You need those marketing generalists who can do more than what's written on the job spec or can figure it out because the team is just not going to have those specialists for a while.
Lyndsay That makes sense. So overall, if you're a founder bringing in your first marketer this person is going to be doing research, they're going to be testing things, they're going to be really adaptable, flexible to what's around them. You need to open up the aperture of what they have access to and what they are empowered to do to really help them be successful.
Kathleen Yeah. They need to have that balance of strategy and execution tiers, able to set a plan, but also they're the only one there. They have to go and execute against that as well.
In the early days, the founders need to spend a lot of time onboarding this person too, because in a lot of ways, the company and strategy is the marketing strategy. So you need to make sure that they understand what's most important and how to make the right trade offs.
Lyndsay It is interesting to hear you talk about making sure the company goals are really clear. I think that's just a hard task for any company to do. You're always iterating, you're responding to the fire that you need to put out. Having that North star is this massive organizational effort. It requires being communicative and team based enough to sort of have everyone around you be on board with the continuing development of those goals.
Kathleen It is! Startups are messy and you're figuring things out and so you don't always know the answers to all of that. But I think knowing what you need to be clear about, here's what we know, here's our hypothesis, here's what we want to go test and see is really important.
Making sure that there's alignment across what you're building, who you're trying to reach with that product, and then what your sales team is selling and who they're targeting. Even if they don't know 100% of the answers, it's good to have clarity of where you're at and in figuring those things out.