As Marketing Recruiters for B2B SaaS startups and scale ups, here’s one thing we see all the time: a founder who knows they need marketing help, but isn’t exactly sure what kind, so they post a generic job description, pick a “great marketer” and hope for the best.
Here’s the thing—not all great marketers are great for your company.
The kind of marketer you need depends entirely on how your company grows. That means aligning the marketer’s skills with your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Otherwise, you’ll waste time, budget, and momentum.
Here’s how to think about it:
Product-Led Growth (PLG)
If your users sign up, onboard, and see value before talking to sales (if they ever do), you need someone who can drive product usage and optimize the self-serve funnel.
Who you need: Growth Marketer / Product Marketer / Lifecycle Marketer
What they do: They obsess over activation, retention, and engagement. They run experiments, analyze behavior, and tune onboarding flows like a growth engine.
Core tools: Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, Appcues
Key metrics: Activation rate, retention rate, product-qualified leads (PQLs)
Sales-Led Growth
If your sales team is the main driver of revenue, you need marketing to feed them qualified leads and support them with the right materials.
Who you need: Demand Gen Marketer / ABM Marketer
What they do: Build pipeline. Launch campaigns. Fuel the sales process with leads and insights. Think MQLs, SQLs, win rates, and tight sales-marketing alignment.
Core tools: HubSpot, Salesforce, Outreach, 6sense
Key metrics: Pipeline generated, MQLs, SQLs, win rate
Marketing-Led Growth
If awareness and inbound demand are your main growth levers, this is all about getting the right content in front of the right people at the right time.
Who you need: Content Marketer / Performance Marketer / Brand Marketer
What they do: Tell your story, attract traffic, and convert visitors. They know SEO, paid media, and how to move someone from “never heard of you” to “can’t wait to try it.”
Core tools: Google Ads, SEMrush, Mailchimp, HubSpot
Key metrics: Web traffic, conversion rate, cost per lead (CPL), brand engagement
Community-Led Growth
If your product is in an extremely niche community or your users are your best advocates, you’re likely growing through word-of-mouth, UGC, and network effects.
Who you need: Community Manager / Evangelist / Social & Content Marketer
What they do: Build trust and engagement with your users. They create spaces for interaction, foster loyalty, and turn customers into champions.
Core tools: Discord, Slack, Circle, Bevy
Key metrics: Community growth, engagement, user-generated content (UGC), brand loyalty
Hybrid: Sales-Assisted PLG
Many SaaS companies end up somewhere in the middle—self-serve up front, with sales stepping in for larger deals.
Who you need: Lifecycle Marketer / Growth Marketer / Revenue Marketer
What they do: These marketers get both sides of the funnel. They understand how to optimize product onboarding and enable sales with qualified leads and tailored hand-offs.
Core tools: HubSpot, Customer.io, Clearbit, Mutiny
Key metrics: PQL to SQL conversion, ARR from self-serve vs. sales-led
Marketplace Models
If your product connects buyers and sellers (or supply and demand), your marketing challenge is twice as complex and so is the talent you need.
Who you need: Acquisition Marketer / Two-Sided Growth Marketer
What they do: Balance the needs of both audiences. They get multi-sided messaging, referral dynamics, and liquidity challenges.
Core tools: Facebook Ads, referral platforms, Braze
Key metrics: CAC by side, liquidity rate, supply/demand balance
Subscription-Based Models
If recurring revenue is your business backbone, retention becomes just as important as acquisition.
Who you need: Retention Marketer / CRM Marketer
What they do: They make sure customers stick around, expand, and renew. Expect email journeys, segmentation, and churn-fighting strategies.
Core tools: Klaviyo, Iterable, Gainsight
Key metrics: Churn rate, LTV, net revenue retention (NRR)
Why This Matters
Hiring “the great”, but wrong kind of marketer is one of the most common and costly mistakes many founders make.
You don’t need “a great marketer.” You need hire the right marketer. Someone with a depth of experience in the problems you are trying to solve and who has scaled companies like yours, using the GTM model you’re betting on.
That’s exactly how we approach every search at Martyn Bassett Associates. We start by understanding your growth trajectory and GTM engine, then match you with marketers who’ve done it before; not in theory, but in practice.
Need Help Hiring the Right Marketer?
We’ve placed hundreds of marketers across North America in seed-stage to large publicly traded tech companies. We’ll help you find someone who fits your GTM model, your business growth goals, and your company stage.