100. Series 3 | Episode 15. When Should B2B Tech Startups Hire Their First Marketer? With Emma Westley, VP of Marketing at Delegate CX

Speaker A: There is a real confusion, especially with early stage startups, between sales and marketing. So they'll think they need to market to an audience and they need to reach that audience, but actually what they need to do is sell to that audience and if that is the case, hire salespeople or as a founder, CEO, uh, get into that selling motion yourself.

Speaker B: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Market Mentors podcast. I'm Matt Dodgson, co founder of Market Recruitment and we connect B2B tech and businesses with marketers to help them grow. This week we're joined by Emma Westley. Emma is now VP of Marketing at Delegate CX after being a fractional CMO and is passionate about all things related to marketing at early stage startups. So a great person to talk to about when startups should hire their first marketer and how to make a success of it. I hope you enjoy. Welcome to the Market Mentors podcast, Emma.

Speaker A: Hi, Matt, Nice to see you again.

Speaker B: Indeed. So, before we get stuck into this one, I'd love to know what your relationship is with B2B Tech Marketing.

Speaker A: I like the way you put that, uh, the relationship with B2B tech marketing. So I've been in B2B tech marketing for quite a while and I Probably just over 20 years have done B2B tech pretty much my whole career before it became sexy. You know, I was doing B2B tech really early on. I actually started in the field of translation, so my degree was actually in languages and then I went into translation, but it sort of moved into marketing because the whole area of translation was quite closely connected to marketing at that point. So, yeah, very quickly got into marketing and then did a few years agency side. So working for B2B tech agencies on big clients like Hewlett Packard and Dell and things. Then moved client side, did a few stints with again, big tech companies like hp, Symantec, Kaspersky, those sorts of companies, and then sort of moved back and forth between the agency and the client world for a while and then about six years ago actually moved into startups. One of my things with working with the bigger companies was that they were a little bit more slow, a little bit more stuck in a lot of bureaucracy and politics. So moved into startup marketing and I've been doing that since, yeah, so about five or six years now. And, um, that's been a combination of freelance, this new concept of fractional working, and now working full time permanently for a US B2B company that's focused on outsourcing and BPO. So that was a very long winded way of saying, I've been in it for a while.

Speaker B: And it sounds like you've done pretty much all of it, haven't you? So big companies, small companies, client side, agency side, you've kind of covered all the aspects. You've got your fractional work in there as well, which is obviously fairly popular at the moment. And it's interesting that you've done that. I mean, we speak to a lot of startups and when they are generally hiring across their marketing teams or they kind of go to market teams, they tend to always have that mindset that they want somebody who's been on a similar journey before. We want somebody who's taken a company from series A to series B or series A to series C. So it's quite rare that we get asked for marketers from large companies. But you've actually made that sort of transition throughout your career, which suggests. Actually it's more about your curiosity, more about your style, your knowledge, and applying that knowledge into a different environment. Maybe a lot of startups are a bit closed off to those sort of ideas, really.

Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, I would liken that to. When I was agency side, there was a lot of stigma about going client side. So there was this thing about, well, if you're agency, you can't go client and vice versa. That persisted for a lot of years now. Obviously that's not the case anymore. But, yeah, it feels like it's flipped now to this. If you're a big company person, you can't go to startup, uh, and vice versa. And of course that's just a gross generalization. It's all down to the person. And you know, there are plenty of people in big companies that are frustrated and want to move faster. And then there's plenty of people in startups who can't keep up with the pace or sort of struggle with the vagueness of it. So, yeah, it's all down to the person. It's not these sort of gross generalizations that we try and latch onto.

Speaker B: Indeed. And, um, I think it's definitely worth us briefly talking about before we sort of get into this podcast, the current environment that a lot of B2B tech companies find themselves in. Because as a lot of people will know, there's been a correction, really, in this market, which impacts both the marketing as well as the hiring. I mean, what have you been seeing yourself?

Speaker A: Gosh, well, the statistics sort of towards the end of last year were not great, were they? So I think I saw the latest numbers were like over 250,000 layoffs in tech, obviously, you know, broader than marketing. And that was across lots of different sizes of companies. So, you know, anything from Google and matter to a lot of startups as well. I think one of the patterns that was happening last year was that a lot of tech companies, especially startups, are propped up by VC money. They're boosted every now and again by big injections of cash coming from the VC ecosystem. And um, last year for that was not great. The amount of VC funding was down. I think Crunchbase were reporting it was the worst in five years in terms of VC funding. And it was anything from 20% drop year on year in Q3, Q4 to something like almost 60% drop in Q1 of last year. Now in the face of it, you gasp and you go, oh my goodness, that's awful. And yes, obviously it resulted in a lot of layoffs and putting the brakes on hiring. But at the same time, if we remember back to even during COVID there was this massive boom in hiring and funding. And so it feels like it's maybe just a bit more of a correction that's happening rather than it being this awful thing that there have been so many layoffs last year. Equally though, companies go through layoffs redundancy rounds quite regularly, especially in tech. And it can be just a bit of a correction of organizational structure or where the money needs to go at different points in the company's journey. It's not necessarily the tech industry is going to fall over. It's not, it's a fundamental of how we do, how we live every day and how we work. So it's probably just a bit of a correction that's happening, happening at the moment.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I remember the dot com bubble, the burst that was probably their first big sort of tech one, wasn't it? And then we had the 2008 recession, then we had Covid. So to be fair, I'm surprised I don't have more gray hair actually. But, uh, certainly from our perspective, hiring has slowed a lot last year, as you can imagine. So there's been definitely a big sort of impact on that. Depends on what level you're at. So for the sort of market that we're in, which is sort of B2B tech startups and scale ups. If you're in marketing, let's take marketing specifically, let's say you're a marketing exec, senior marketing exec, marketing manager, maybe up to sort of 50,000, 60,000. Actually the jobs market is pretty good. You'll find a job pretty quickly. And especially those people that can think and plan and do a little bit of strategy, but actually aren't too removed from the execution type of side of things. That market's really buoyant. You probably can't find enough marketers and I think a lot of companies think that, oh, we've got a role coming up, it's going to be quite easy to recruit at that level and they're quite shocked by the lack of volume. Whereas at, uh, the senior end, you know, head of marketing, marketing director, cmo, I'd say there's quite a shortage of roles. I mean, as you'd expect, there's always a pyramid, there's only one person at the top sort of holding the whole team together. But actually I say in terms of where it's impacted the most, it's probably impacted the most at that sort of senior level, unfortunately. So, you know, I've spoken to some really very talented marketers who've been let go, uh, no fault of their own, perhaps have worked for US companies and those US companies have trimmed the EMEA side of things, but it's taken them 3, 4, 5, 6 months to find new gigs and some still haven't. So it is a bit of a slightly different jobs market depending on what level you're at. We're here to kind of talk a little bit about marketing within sort of startups themselves. These early stage startups we're touching on now, it's hard to raise money, but they might have raised a little bit of money. They might not, they might be growing nicely or been bootstrapped. Would you believe it? It can be done, but from a sort of hiring perspective on the marketing side, given your experience, you know, if you're talking to sort of CEOs and founders, when do you think is the right time to sort of press the button on? Right, we need to hire a marketer. What are your thoughts there?

Speaker A: Well, I'm going to be the awful person that says, you know, it depends and it does depend depends on the business. You know, is it a product led business, is it a sales led, is it software, is it services? So there's lots of those sorts of things that factor into it. The other thing obviously being, yes, have you got funding, have you not got funding? Are you pre product or pre product market fit? All those sorts of things sort of play into it. Generally though, I think, you know, if you're a CEO, founder, maybe, uh, you've got a small team around you in terms of, you know, if it's a product company, you've got a small engineering team or if you're a sales led company, you've got small sales team and customer success. Generally. The first sort of flag that you'll want to think, actually, yeah, we need some sort of marketing help is if you need to go out to a broader audience and you need to market to that audience. And um, I will put such emphasis on that word market because there is a real confusion, especially with early stage startups between sales and marketing. So they'll think they need to market to an audience and they need to reach that audience, but actually what they need to do is sell to that audience and if that is the case, you know, hire salespeople or, you know, as a founder, CEO, get into that selling motion yourself. So be clear on what that means in terms of you need to market to an audience. And that means you're looking at lead times that are inherent in marketing, especially in B2B, you know, if you've got long, long sales cycles. Marketing is about generating, you know, brand awareness, generating demand. Yes, okay, creating some sort of pipeline, leads, whatever, but it's not about creating sales. There is a distinct difference that a lot of CEOs and a lot of founders get wrong there. Yeah, you've got your product, you've got something that you need to market to a wider audience. That's probably your first trigger, first flag to say, right, you need some sort of marketing help. Now again, a little bit of a mindset shift for a lot of people is you don't need to automatically go full time. And the good thing at the moment is that there are lots and lots of different options available in the market in terms of how you can hire. And one of the things I talk obviously a little bit from a biased perspective here, having come from this recently, is this fractional approach. What a fractional does is a little bit like a consultant, but it's more on a long term basis. So if you think if a consultant comes in and maybe does a uh, finite project, like a two month thing based on a very specific area of your business, and then a fractional would be more long term, it's a little like part time, more on a long term basis, but still an independent person, they're not an employee of the company, they're usually a little bit more senior as well. So if you've got question marks around, you know, who is the audience that you need to reach or how do you reach them? What is the strategy you're going to market Strategy, then a CMO fractional marketing director. That sort of level is a really good first person to bring in and get them involved in your business and get them helping to define that. Go to market.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good suggestion. I mean we've suggested a couple of times to our clients where I think one of the big mistakes certainly from our perspective is that when companies think of hiring their first marketer, they've perhaps done a series A or whatever it might be, they go too senior.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Ah, too early. They think they need a VP of marketing or a chief marketing officer or whatever it might be and they're looking at profiles thinking, oh, hang on a minute, this person's got a company from series A to series C. They're perfect for our early stage startups. So they tend to go a little bit too senior too soon. And therefore that person doesn't really want to get their hands dirty too much. So the output is effective. But actually backing up what you talked about, one of the things that has worked quite well for uh, some of our customers is that you hire a little bit lower in terms of the level. That is more of an execution person, somebody that can grow into a more senior role further down the line. But then you layer on top fractional person. So you have the fractional person that can sort of help on the strategic stuff and the positioning, the messaging helping that experience and also then help develop and nurture that more junior marketer. And then the junior marketer is still able to plan and think and all that kind of stuff, but it's happy executing and feels more supported because you'll know more than anybody else. These roles are very, very difficult roles. You can get pulled in lots of different directions, especially if you are a little bit more inexperienced. So having the more focused approach with the help of somebody who sort of layers on top can give you almost like the best of both worlds really.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it's interesting. So the US market are probably a little ahead of Europe and possibly even Asia in this and um, they're really good at sort of putting that structure place and saying, right, we'll get a full time hiring. But that's someone a bit more sort of execution based, got the right attitude, the right basic sort of soft skills or approach to marketing, possibly even a little bit T shaped, you know, has a generalist approach but with a specific focus on, you know, paid ads or SEO or something. But yeah, then you're layering in this senior person but you're not having to pay for that. Senior person on a full time basis. One, because you don't need them on a full time. But two, you can save money as well. You shouldn't be putting all that money into a senior full time hire if you're truly an early stage startup. And so having that combination of, yeah, execution person with the slightly senior head is a good combination. One of the things that also is really important early stage for CEOs and founders is knowing how to push back on certain things. Especially from a marketing perspective. If you're an early stage startup, um, you've got a lot of pressures on you and if you've got VC funding, any sort of funding, you've got that additional pressure of where are the results, what's the ROI on this? You know, two months in and having someone a little bit more senior to push back on that and say, well actually this is going to take six months to have an impact. You know, we'll not see the ROI yet. We need to be patient or knowing. Yeah, actually we do need to pivot. We need to change something in this strategy, in that sort of structure of senior, fractional and more junior full time, the full time person is learning how you do that because they're seeing it happen with the more senior person but they're not having to do it themselves. That's something that takes quite a bit of experience and quite a bit of time to gain experience of. So yeah, that combination again sort of helps with defining what the strategy needs to be and how to interface with the founder, the CEO and the senior team.

Speaker B: And it's interesting you mentioned T shaped because my next question was going to be, well, what do you get this marketer to do? And actually, you know, the answer is of course it depends on things. But do you think there's a sort of type of profile that you think lends itself be more suited to early stage startups and from a marketing point

Speaker A: of view, yeah, so I think in terms of like general attitude, general approach, it's things like being adaptable, being flexible. I think having a basic sort of understanding of marketing as a whole, you know, just being able to understand that obviously, you know, there are different channels, there are different ways of doing things, those sorts of overall things. But then when it comes to the T shape, this is why I was saying earlier about it's important that you have to have some sort of go to market proven out. And especially for B2B companies, you know, if you've got that sales motion in place, you should have some understanding of what channels are Working to reach your customers, albeit you need to refine those channels. You might need to test sort of complementary channels from a marketing perspective. So that will define your T shape as basically right. We need a generalist that's going to be able to pick up things quickly, learn new things easily. But we know that they need to be able to focus on events or slightly more of a digital slant in terms of paid ads or something like that. So it's that sort of knowing which skill set to focus on, albeit it's more about bringing the right attitude to it, especially for working with small teams.

Speaker B: Yeah, the strategy can change, can't it? And I think again, one of the common mistakes sometimes is people are so fixated on right inbound is going to be our channel or paid ads is going to be our channel or whatever it might be that might pivot. And if you're hiring somebody who's too much of a sort of specialist, then you can make it quite difficult for that person because then you're asking them to broaden out of the original job description description or out, uh, of their original skill set. And some might be able to do it, but some might not be interested in doing it. They might be more keen on working in those more specialist areas. So T shaped marketers are great hire, I think, just because of the breadth of their experience, their ability to actually move between the different areas. And you know, you talked a little bit about the fractional stuff at the top, but actually there are plenty of freelancers as well you can bring in if you perhaps are just a little bit light in terms of pay per click knowledge, which can get a bit technical or even like technical. SEO is a good one as well, isn't it? So you can use these consultants, which doesn't really make it that expensive. So yeah, as long as you're able to sort of work through the subject matter, you can then bring on these experts to help you even just sort of set things up and get things going for you.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's also these new agency models. So, you know, we think of, you know, old school agencies, obviously the big ones like Saatchi and stuff, but there are new agency models that work really well in that situation as well. So they're more distributed. They're not necessarily all full time people. They're sort of groups of basically freelancers or strategists maybe with a few people that are sort of running the agency itself. And those are really good teams to bring in for that sort of thing because, you know, one I'm Thinking of in particular is an agency called Growth Division who work with startups and they're really, really good at bringing in like different specialists, skills and mixing and matching that uh, as well and changing depending on, you know. Right, we've got to test this channel. Right, that didn't work. Let's test this channel. And they're bringing in sort of different people at different points. So that is a completely different approach that a lot of startups don't realize is out there as well.

Speaker B: M yeah, I think they probably put them in the bucket of agencies are very expensive and perhaps a little bit more rigid in terms of what they do. Whereas that sounds a lot more sort of growth experimental which is kind of what you need, isn't it? You want to test things and see if they work. If you get enough of a uh, positive signal you can invest a little bit more, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, it's a good suggestion. You touched on it earlier actually when you were talking about the length of time it takes for things to work. Sometimes where there's a mismatch between what a CEO or a founder team expects from their first marketer and what's really realistic. The founders are perhaps used to sales and maybe there might be sort of tech developers themselves. So they don't perhaps understand that certainly within a lot of B2B areas it does take quite a while for things to take effect. How would a CEO, uh, or a founder know whether or not marketing's working or not?

Speaker A: So I think there's lots of things that will go into that. First of all, what is it that you're doing from a marketing perspective? Because obviously there are channels that will have a, ah, quicker impact. You know, if you've got a very, very simple self service product or piece of software and um, it's targeting other startups or SMBs, your sales cycle is probably going to be quite short. So you can see quite quickly from that. Okay, well you know, for testing this marketing channel it is having an impact. It's at least creating pipeline or it's getting the eyeballs on it that it needs to to then be able to convert. But if you're more service led company or targeting enterprise clients, your sales cycle is potentially going to be 912 months, possibly even more in a market, in an economy like it is at the moment. So expecting a marketing channel to flip, the impact of that uh, in a matter of months is nonsensical. It's not going to work. So think about it sensibly in terms of what does your business do and how much traction have you got so far? How can you replicate that and how long is that going to take? But generally I think this is where this sort of more senior person will come into, is being able to judge if you're looking at a certain channel, are the metrics that you're getting within that channel healthy? Are they what you should be expecting? Are they pointing towards, as I say, generating some sort of pipeline, but then even taking that further back up the funnel, up the sort of marketing process to say, are we creating the brand awareness that we need to in the initial stages and then is that going to filter through in six months to a pipeline? It does need patience if you've got longer sales cycles and it needs a few different sort of things happening at different customer journey stages to get the awareness of the product or the brand out there, get some sort of education in the market to clients and then to start converting that on a gradual basis. But yeah, I think it's probably knowing within those channels that you're looking at, are those metrics healthy, are they pointing in the right direction at least to start with, so that it will then convert in however many months time?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think we've heard so much about leads and lead scoring and attribution and revenue. Rightly so. It's almost like a lot of people focus so much on that because they think that's what they need to be thinking, thinking about rather than exactly what you were talking about. Okay, you need to do the bit the first. You need to build awareness in the market. You need to focus not, uh, I guess, would they call them vanity sort of metrics? They became known as. But these are kind of indicators that actually your message is landing people are understanding who you are, what you do, your point of difference, whatever it might be, that will then translate into. Okay, do you know what I'm thinking of buying that learning management system. I saw some great educational content on, um, LinkedIn. And then they start piecing it together and then it becomes a lead, doesn't it? I don't know. You may think differently to me, but maybe CEOs and founder teams think, okay, well we just need leads and revenue and that's the only way we're going to start to understand whether or not you're doing a good job for us. And we want it quickly, we want it in a month, two months. They can sort of run out of patience a little bit. And you hear so much more about brand these days, don't you? It's easier to build features. And tech brand is really making a bit of a resurgence within sort of B2B marketing especially. So, you know, these things that were sort of maybe put in the fluffy bucket a little while ago are super, uh, super important.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think it comes back to that VC stuff that we were talking about at the start, which is a lot of products out there, a lot of software solutions, even tech services have been propped up by VC money. And actually when you take that away, we're all finding that, you know, maybe these things aren't needed in the market. And actually, you know, when you take it back to, well, people have to get out there and sell and do, you know, this makes me sound old, but the basics of marketing, the basics of brand building, then you start to see which are the products, which are the companies and the brands that are actually going to be sustainable and are actually going to be growing, as opposed to just being propped up by money that's isn't actually showing what the EBITDA actually is. It's just a cash injection. So, yeah, it does sort of come back to what is the truth behind that, uh, funding bubble that we've seen. And, um, when you strip it back, as you say, like we're getting back to some of those brand fundamentals that need to happen. There's a lot of sort of noise at the moment around that. Uh, I don't know. Do you know the guy who runs. Well, he's actually just sort of taken a different position, but the guy who runs Refine Labs. Chris Walker.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah. So he's obviously a big voice in B2B marketing. And his thing for years now has been you can't track everything and you can't attribute every lead to a channel or whatever. And there's all this sort of dark stuff happening. And brand is a little bit like that. You know, you can't track it to the nth degree. You can't say, well, yeah, we've done this amount of brand awareness in digital or even above the line now, and yeah, it's automatically resulting in this number of leads or this roi. There's a lot of gut instinct will factor into that as well. In terms of, given the context of the business, what are the right things that we need to do from a marketing perspective and then be patient with those to prove them out. So, yeah, uh, it's an interesting debate at the moment.

Speaker B: It is, it is. Tech companies are very good at letting us believe that we need their solutions. We need to advertise on LinkedIn, our website is the channel that brings in all the traffic, all this other stuff, they're fantastic at giving us that sort of information. But you go to an event and see somebody speak you might lump on a website, would you attribute it to the event or somebody landing on the website? Or if you've been referred to by somebody who, you know, check out this solution, that kind of dark social piece, and maybe you just happen to see a, uh, paid ad, a paid social ad pop up and you click on that Facebook Avenue, believe that Facebook were the reason for that conversion, whereas it could have been somebody mentioning the name to you in an old school way. So tech companies are pretty good that they make us believe that we need their solutions all the time. We obviously do to a certain degree. Yeah, we touched on some of the stuff about where startups sort of get this wrong from a marketing point of view. We talked about sort of hiring a bit too senior, didn't we? And perhaps not giving that person as much support. Any other ways that you've experienced where startups tend to get marketing wrong?

Speaker A: Well, I touched on it earlier was the whole confusion between marketing and sales. There was a tech company I worked with on a fractional basis a few years ago and they had it in their heads that they needed to reach a wider audience. You know, they wanted to grow the business. So they thought, right, we need to reach a wider audience. And so automatically equated that to right, well, we need to do marketing. You know, it was a very sort of CEO mentality. Right, yeah, quick, that's our solution. Let's get a marketing person in. So I went in and yeah, there were some things on the marketing side that they needed help with in terms of just repositioning the brand a little bit and fixing the messaging. So it was going to land with that audience, but their issue was sales. It was they just needed to get out and um, sell more. You know, this is a thing that happens with even established businesses, but definitely with 30 stage startups is they maybe have a little bit of traction or a few sales and they think, you know, right, that's enough, let's switch to marketing. And actually what they'd be better doing is increasing their sales team or putting more of a structure in place in terms of how they process sales at different stages. So yeah, that's definitely one of the common things in B2B that happens with 30 stage startups. And we've touched on the other ones which are hiring two senior, also hiring two junior and expecting that person to Know how to do everything. I mean you must have come across this with startups who'll say, right, we want that unicorn, we want that person that's going to come in at uh, two or three years experience and be able to do everything.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean my view is always you need somebody to get you to the next step. It's a range of stepping stones and trying to hire the unicorn or the person that's worked for a company like HubSpot, uh, or has got a company from series A to series C may sound brilliant on paper, but actually all you need is somebody to get you to that next stepping stone and that uh, next stepping stone and that next stepping stone. And sometimes people just try and hire just a bit too further on from what they actually really need. And then also it's just been able to assess it, isn't it? So, you know, being able to talk about it, it eloquently in an interview is very different being able to put it into practice. And I think sometimes founders and CEOs get bought into the people who can interview really well and talk a good game. Whereas you really want somebody who's got those skills because you're in B2B. It's all about bringing people on for the story and influencing and working with people and all that sort of stuff. Communication is really, really important. But you need people that can get it done. You know, the sort of hands on technical bits and the understanding and getting underneath the hood. And I think Sometimes, you know, CEOs and founders, understandably, because they're not marketers themselves, find it quite difficult to assess for that. You know, you'd be surprised. Maybe, maybe not. But I mean I've been on calls where we've had CEOs saying, Look, I don't know how to assess, I don't really know how to assess the skills. And if you're not able to do that, it's a bit of a lottery.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I think that's one that, yeah, we've yet to crack in the whole recruitment and interviewing area. I mean I read recently actually Antler, um, vc, I don't know whether this was research based but they put the figure at 50%. So 50% of startups are getting their first marketing hire wrong. That's quite high with the amount of investment that you put into the recruitment, the training, the onboarding of that person. Do you think that's about right, 50%?

Speaker B: Does that sound, I wouldn't be surprised by that.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I think what you touched on was a really good point. Is that is it a marketing problem or is it a sales problem? Is it a product market fit problem? So actually I think a lot of these companies are quite volatile anyway. I think sometimes people think let's plug in a marketer to fix our demand gen. We haven't got enough leads, let's hire a demand gen focused marketer. It's not often the sort of solution really. And these jobs are pretty full on as you know. You don't have a lot of time, you don't have a lot of budget, you're trying to get time with, with busy founders, really, really hard to do. The level of the salary means that you're actually not that senior. So it's quite difficult at times for you to push back. So I think the roles themselves are actually pretty challenging too. So people might do them and think, do you know what, there might be easier roles out there. Let's go and work for a marketer and learn my craft. Let's work for a bigger organization and learn it in that sort of environment and then perhaps come back to startups. So I think the roles by their very nature are uh, quite volatile. So maybe that sort of leads into that sort of 50% maybe as the

Speaker A: candidate, as the person sort of going in, don't put so much pressure on yourself that you know, you've got to go in and fix all these issues because there's so many things that go into a business, you know, you touched on some of them there. Is it product market fit, is it right product, wrong time or right time, wrong product. There's so many things that play into it. So maybe as a candidate or that first hire going in, don't think you've got to fix everything, think, right, I'm going to go in and try this or try that and if those things don't work then there are other things that might need to be fixed. And the good thing is now that moving from one company to another is not as bad as it used to be. If you do six months at uh, a startup and then have to go to another startup or another company and do six months, there's, then there's not as much of a stigma because everybody understands that, yeah, startups are volatile and have to pivot and may go under pretty quickly. So yeah, maybe just sort of taking that pressure off yourself as the hire going in, you don't need to fix it all and doesn't work, that's fine, just move on.

Speaker B: No, indeed. Well, last question then. It'd be great to get your thoughts on this. And we kind of touched on a few bits and bobs here, haven't we, throughout the podcast? You know, if you're a founder of an early stage B2B tech tech startup, then, and you were hiring your first marketer, uh, what sort of skills and experience would you look for, Emma?

Speaker A: So definitely those ones that I touched on earlier in terms of adaptability, flexibility. One of the questions that I always like to ask is, how do you learn? And, um, looking for answers around things like, well, you know, if I find that I don't know how to do something, I'll just go onto YouTube and find M a video that explains how to do it. That sort of attitude of, well, work it out, I'll go onto YouTube or my favorite one at the moment is actually Excel Tips on Instagram. This seems to be a big thing where you can just go on and learn stuff that you never knew how to do. But these people that specialize in Excel on Instagram. So that sort of attitude of, well, it doesn't matter that I don't know it, I can work it out or I can find it out. Or the other attitude of, well, in marketing, we're not saving lives. Usually if you try something and it doesn't work, does that matter? You can fix it. If you send an email and it's got the wrong subject line in it, uh, is that really such a big deal? Or if you put a campaign live on Google or LinkedIn and, um, you've got something not quite right in it, does that matter? As long as you're picking up on that, you're fixing it and you're learning. It's that sort of mentality, being able to pivot so, you know, being able to sort of adapt and move. And again, that doesn't come back to, oh, well, you've done it in a startup before, you could have done it somewhere else. Even in your personal life, if you've demonstrated that you've pivoted from one approach to another, then that's a really good skill to have. I think in terms of, you know, the harder skills, it is ideally that t shape, you know, having a broad understanding of how all the channels fit together, why you might want to mix these two channels or those two. Not necessarily going across all channels, but understanding that you've got to pick and choose based on the business context, and then having that T shape being either a little bit of experience or an interest in content or SEO or email, and then obviously asking questions around, well, how do you Demonstrate that interest or that t shape. What are the newsletters that you read? Who are the people that you follow on social, that sort of thing. And more and more obviously that community based stuff, you know, what communities are you in and how are you engaged in those? How do you learn from them? So, yeah, that takes it nicely back to the learning mentality. Learning attitude being key.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. I love the curiosity side as well. And you know, that translates not only in terms of what you've done, but demonstrate that in an interview. Everybody knows we should be doing some research, but do some real research. What are they doing at the moment in the area that you're interviewing for? What's working, what's not? What's your view on this? What could you tweak and, uh, just have a few ideas, even if those ideas aren't quite right. As long as you're turning up with something, a view and back it up with some substance. That's what people want. They want people who've got that curiosity. So, um, I wholeheartedly agree on that front. Well, Emma, it's been fantastic to talk to you. It's been great to talk to you in particular because you've had such a broad and wide career across all those different areas we're talking about, whether it be big companies, small companies, client side, agency side and fractional work and all sorts. It's been great talking to you and diving into your experiences. So I really do appreciate your time.

Speaker A: Thanks, Matt. It was lovely to chat all things startup marketing and yeah, thanks for having me on.

Speaker B: Pleasure, pleasure. So that's it for another episode of the Market Mentors podcast. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, then please leave a review as that helps the channel going forward. Until next,

Speaker A: Sam.