It's a question a lot of our clients ask us: what does your marketing team need to look like for you to maximize the value you're capturing?

There’s no quick answer here: depending on where you are as a business, the answer is going to look different.

In this post, we’ll walk you through a framework for building the right marketing org structure for your particular situation.

4 considerations when structuring your marketing team

The realities many organizations experience are that:

• Marketing teams are usually small and mighty. They're usually in charge of a lot of items, projects, tasks, initiatives, and large revenue targets. 
• Aggressive growth targets are being set by the board or by the executive team. There isn't nearly enough bandwidth to execute on what's needed to hit those targets or do all the activities you need to take the company where it needs to go.
• At the same time, there's an inability to get approval for more budget for additional headcount that's requi...

After weeks (or even months) of searching, you’ve found the ideal candidate to fill a role on your marketing team. You’ve both signed the contract, and they’re starting next week. At this point, a lot of CEOs and marketing leaders breathe a sigh of relief. The position is filled; their job is done.

Only, your job isn’t done once the new hire starts.

Even with the most thorough hiring process and the most suitable candidate, a lot can go wrong in the onboarding period. If you don’t start off a new marketing employee’s tenure with your company the right way, you’ll likely see:

• Unengaged and unmotivated employees
• Fragmented team
• Missed targets
• Rapid employee turnover
• Low ROI on your hiring investment
• Limited or even negative Marketing-led growth

Investing time and resources into effective onboarding is in the interest of the business, the marketing team, and the individual employee.

Of course, every company, team, and individual will need slightly different onboarding to sui...

Whether you're building a digital marketing team from scratch as your company scales, replacing a team member, or restructuring a newly integrated function area, growing a digital marketing team comes with plenty of challenges:

• Do you have enough budget to hire for all the roles you need?
• Does your digital marketing team have the best possible structure?
• Are you looking for the right skillsets? 
• Can you find qualified candidates?
• Can you merge new hires into your team?

From helping dozens of SaaS companies build better digital marketing teams, we've put together a toolkit of templates that addresses these challenges.

In this toolkit, you'll find:

• Marketing team structure deck
• Marketing team job description templates
• Marketing onboarding checklist

Fill in the form below to download the toolkit now, or read on to learn more about each template. 

Marketing Team Structure Deck

It's easy to default to just replacing employees who leave or adding more marketing ...

Fractional or interim CMOs are a common choice for startups and small businesses that can’t yet afford or don’t yet need a full-time CMO. In the earliest days, many businesses don't have 40 hours of CMO-level work each week, and fractional services can be a way to get the benefits of CMO experience for less than the salary of a full-time employee. However, this is just one situation in which fractional CMOs can help. 

Have you considered what a fractional CMO can offer to established enterprise-level businesses?

While some fractional CMO services focus on covering the basics for small businesses, others are designed specifically to take successful businesses to the next level.

So, is a fractional CMO the right choice for your business? What can they offer that you won’t get from a full-time CMO?

In this article, you’ll learn:

• What the term “fractional CMO” really means
• How a fractional CMO works
• Why so many businesses are looking for fractional CMOs
• When to consider working w...

When you bring on new portfolio companies, defining titles, setting expectations and clearly assigning responsibilities in the company is usually among the first things you do. This should include identifying and optimizing areas of alignment between the leaders in the company. But, too often, this gets pushed to the back burner because there doesn’t seem to be a direct connection to the investment thesis or because investors are cautious of interfering with the company’s internal dynamics.

However, without alignment between function area leaders, the company could be:

• Missing out on budget efficiencies
• Spending dozens of hours on overlapping work
• Losing potential customers in the cracks between departments
• Pulling the business in multiple different directions

You can’t assume the executive team will be aligned just because they’re in the same office. These relationships need to be proactively managed, with clear communication requirements and goals that make sense for both ...

Whether you’re filling gaps in the current marketing strategy, growing the marketing function, or restructuring the team to merge products, hiring new marketing leaders is a common step after an acquisition. 

Without the right leaders, Marketing won’t have the management and expertise it needs to scale demand generation, improve nurture, and support Sales. But finding marketing leaders that suit the company, its objectives, and your ideal roadmap can be a challenge.

The right marketing leaders will accelerate your growth; the wrong marketing leaders will keep you stagnating at status quo, or make rash decisions that could damage your brand. If you hire a CMO who isn’t a good fit for your business, the best-case scenario is several months of slow progress on your growth levers, money wasted on initiatives that go nowhere, and the expense and hassle of hiring a replacement within a year.

For PE firms, that kind of outcome is disastrous. With a limited time to grow the company’s revenu...

Digital marketing can generate incredible ROI, but to capture that potential value you need a well-organized team of experts.

If your Facebook ads are already driving leads, a paid media expert and a skilled marketing designer could optimize the ads to deliver leads that are higher quality. If a blog post is capturing 20 email addresses each month, the right writing and SEO skills could help it capture 50. 

Building a team that can maximize the impact of your digital channels isn’t just a case of hiring extra digital marketers. Instead, the most successful marketing teams are structured in a way that focuses on digital marketing results and includes specific key skills.

You can use these links to jump to a specific section:

• Two hiring approaches that hold teams back
• What a digital marketing team should include
• How to structure a marketing team
• Digital marketing team role descriptions

When you're ready to start hiring, click here to download our Marketing Leader Job Descript...

One of the biggest opportunities post acquisition is to find efficiencies on the marketing side, and this is often an ignored area because there are usually a lot of efficiencies in sales, product, finance and services.

Within marketing, there are five domains that you can look to integrate:

1. Brand: making multiple business units and product lines look like one entity.
2. Programs: initiatives core to the investment thesis to grow the business
3. Teams: you have multiple business units with their own marketing teams and so you have to try to find synergies 
4. Data Governance: you have customer data now living in multiple databases
5. Marketing Stack: different business units are likely spending on the same tools or overlapping tools and paying for both

Planning your integration? Download our ultimate marketing integration checklist.

Brand

The biggest mistake is when companies focus on branding as the primary driver of value creation from the marketing function after an acquisition f...

What does it take to be a great product leader and what characteristics should you look for when hiring one for your SaaS company? Given that every SaaS company is a product oriented company, this is one of the most important roles that you're going to find inside your business, so it's very important that we think about it in the right way.

If you prefer audio, listen to the podcast episode here:

You can use these links to jump to a specific section:

• The intersection of product management
• The fourth critical skillset: Marketing understanding
• How do I hire a good product manager?

The intersection of Product Management

A simple way to think about the product management leader is someone who sits at the intersection of user experience, technology and the business. Their job is to drive the customer experience forward so that the product is easy to learn, adopt, and use, to work with technology leaders to ensure that the product is built with the right ...