Building a Profile for Your Next Marketing Hire

Hiring a marketing leader is difficult because the job can mean completely different things depending on the company.

One business needs someone to build marketing from scratch. Another needs a leader who can scale an existing team, and another has plenty of marketing activity but needs to rethink its positioning, GTM strategy or organization.

All three might be hiring a VP of Marketing or CMO, but they shouldn’t necessarily be looking for the same person.

The challenge becomes about deciphering whether they’re the right marketing leader for the business you have today and the one you’re trying to build next.

Start with the Mandate

Marketing leadership searches often begin with a list of qualifications like: 

• B2B experience
• Demand generation
• Product marketing
• Team leadership
• Salesforce experience
• HubSpot knowledge
• AI depth
• Product Marketing

Before long, the job description describes a marketer who does everything. Think of when you’re buying a house – there’s nice to haves vs. must haves. Some things can be renovated. Similarly, some things can be taught. 

Some marketers are exceptional builders and some know how to scale an existing organization. However, most experienced leaders can operate across several of these areas. Very few are equally strong at all of them.

So before defining the candidate, define the mandate:

What does this person need to change in the next 12 to 18 months?

That answer should shape the profile.

The Builder

Some companies don’t need a CMO to inherit a marketing organization. They need someone to create one.

The builder is comfortable with ambiguity. They don’t expect a perfect tech stack, established processes or a fully staffed team. They can move between strategy and execution without worrying too much about where their job description begins and ends.

They might spend Monday working through positioning with the CEO, Tuesday interviewing candidates and Wednesday rebuilding the funnel model with sales.

Builders are particularly valuable when a company has reached the point where founder-led marketing is no longer enough, or when a new strategy requires the marketing organization to operate very differently.

The person who loves building the machine, however, isn’t always the person who wants to run it forever.

The Scaler

At another stage, the problem isn’t creating marketing. It’s making marketing repeatable.

The company has a team. Programs are running. Pipeline is being generated. There may already be functional leaders across demand generation, product marketing, content, field marketing and operations.

Now the job changes.

The marketing leader needs to establish operating rhythms, allocate budget across competing priorities, develop the leaders underneath them and create predictability.

They need to know when to standardize and when to experiment.

And they need to become comfortable being further away from the work itself. Their job is increasingly to build the system that produces good marketing rather than personally producing all of it.

That’s a different skill set from building something from zero.

The Transformer

Then there are companies where marketing already exists, but something isn’t working.

The positioning no longer reflects the business. Pipeline has slowed. Marketing and sales disagree about the funnel. The company has accumulated years of campaigns, tools and processes without a clear strategy connecting them.

This requires another type of leader.

Transformers need to diagnose before they prescribe.

They need to understand which parts of the existing organization are valuable, which need to change and which may no longer serve the business.

And transformation requires more than changing the marketing plan. The leader needs enough organizational judgment to bring people with them.

Changing the messaging is relatively easy. Changing how product, sales and marketing make decisions together is harder.

The Commercial Marketing Leader

This one is a little different because it isn’t necessarily a stage. It’s increasingly a requirement across all three.

CEOs expect marketing leaders to understand how the business makes money.

That doesn’t mean every CMO needs to become a CRO. But marketing leaders should understand the economics of customer acquisition, how pipeline moves through the funnel, where conversion breaks down and how marketing investment connects to growth.

They should be able to sit with a CFO and have a meaningful conversation about budget allocation.

They should be able to sit with sales and talk about pipeline without turning the conversation into an argument about attribution.

That commercial fluency matters whether the leader’s background is brand, demand generation, product marketing or something else entirely.

The right leader depends on the job

There isn’t one ideal marketing leadership profile.

A leader who was exceptional at a $500 million company may not be the right person to build marketing at a $20 million company. A scrappy builder who thrives on creating something from nothing may not be energized by managing a mature organization with established teams and processes. Neither is the better marketer.

They’re different marketers built for different jobs.

Before you start looking for the next CMO or VP of Marketing, get clear on what you’re actually asking them to do.

Are you building? Scaling? Transforming?

And regardless of the answer, can they connect the work of marketing to the commercial priorities of the business?

Define that first. Then go find the person who’s done it before. And if you need help answering these questions, or finding the right person, let’s talk.