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.