As a startup focused recruitment firm, we are often tasked with recruiting first-time leadership hires - just as often we get the question, “what should I call them?”
Our five-part Checklist to Simplify Titles series was created to simplify title selection for early-stage CEOs and/or Founders. We want to share our insights and cover the basics to help you determine which title you should choose when hiring a Sales, Product or Marketing Leader.
This week, we will focus on Marketing, which as we know can be filled with lots of interesting and somewhat misleading titles.
CMO
- Reports to the Board and/or Founder/CEO
- Board involvement
- Participates in raising capital
- Often hired to participate in a pivot/reset or turn around
- Current or intended growth of the marketing organization includes team(s) focused growth
- Leads other leaders
- Global scope
- Focuses on strategy and their team focuses on execution
- P&L responsibilities, possibility may own revenue
- Title is often earned based on the number of years of experience and scope of responsibilities
VP Marketing
- Reports to CMO, CRO, COO or CEO/Founder
- Participates in company "town halls" as the functional leader
- Often hired as part of a scale-up or when a venture raise enables the completion of the SLT
- Typically hired after a handful of individual contributors have been functioning for a while as a scrappy team reporting to a Founder or into Ops or the Sales Leader
- Could be the senior most marketing leader and often leads Directors, Managers or a team of individual contributors
- Moves across strategy and execution seamlessly, "rolling up their sleeves" when necessary
- Tapped to make decisions about marketing tech-stack
- Responsible for the marketing budget
Hiring a Head of Marketing? Make sure they have these 5 moved coveted traits
Head of Marketing
- Reports to the Founder/CEO
- Could be hired as the sole marketer or to provide leadership for a small team
- This title typically comes from young modern tech startups and is applied to attract a senior level individual contributor, or as part of a retention strategy
- Often a scrappy persona, they are hands-on executing, developing the strategy as they go (build the plane while flying)
- They are close to the tech stack
- Their KPIs are related to growth, leads, and inbound marketing
- May or may not own a budget, depending on the size of the start up
Looking for Customer Success or Engineering title advice? Stay tuned for the rest of our five-part checklist series.