July 29, 2014
Video: Crittercisms CEO on Enterprise Sales
Andrew Levy, CEO of Crittercism found out early on that enterprise sales is no cake walk. In 2013, his company’s flagship product had more...
Heavybit works with developer, infrastructure and enterprise SaaS companies. Founding teams generally have a great understanding of their initial users and are highly technical with a good network for engineering and product hires. But I’m often asked to help build descriptions, source, and define metrics for a first marketing hire. Some of the common questions include:
TL;DR: The right hire is often an ambitious person with a minimum of 5 years experience in product marketing at an early-stage startup including researching, positioning, and launching a similar product to a similar audience. Candidates often have had KPIs concerned with onboarding and activation, new feature releases, pricing launches, and platform adoption. Candidate keywords might include: product marketing, growth, advocacy, platform marketing, user adoption, technical marketing.
Most of the product marketing managers (PMMs) I know at early companies report directly to a VP Platform or Product. This is often very different from someone in a communications, PR or content marketing role. This isn’t to say you should only hire marketers with a past product marketing title, but they should be willing to tackle some of these responsibilities:
As with most sourcing, you should ask for in-network referrals and do targeted outreach via LinkedIn. You probably already know which of your competitors and partners have great product marketing teams. Don’t be afraid to ask these teams to socialize your reqs. You can also send your product manager to events like the SF Product Marketer’s Meetup, or sponsor similar events in your locale. Experienced product managers tend to be a good source for PMM referrals as they’ll have either run their own searches, or worked with a great PMM. In short, network and play nice.
Beyond sourcing, your company narrative and attentiveness are key to the hiring process. As most PMMs are technical, know your audience, and have a specific skill set; this is a tough role to fill.
Founders and hiring managers need to understand how to sell the opportunity. First off, you should be able to roughly match the comp package (salary and equity) of similar stage competitors and right-size the package for your HQ locale. But secondly, you need to have your story straight. Beyond comp, here are some of the reasons PMMs have chosen early-stage and often lesser known companies:
In summary, as with most early hires, your first marketer should be willing to produce strategic plans, while also executing on them. At most pre-Series B startups, there’s really little room for ideation “gurus” or those interested in highly-specialized roles. In many cases, the right early hire is willing to brute force their way towards user adoption/growth using a variety of tactics, until you can afford to hire against or automate some of your early processes.
For more information on what early marketers can do, check out the below videos:
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