The Superhero Hire

Every couple of months a founder tells me they are about to hire a VP Marketing. I ask the same question before anything else. What is the problem this person is being hired to solve?

The answer usually arrives in one word. Growth. Sometimes two. Pipeline predictability. Occasionally the honest version, which is that they need someone senior in the room.

Those are outcomes and moods. Neither one is a problem.

Then I read the job spec, and it is always assembled from the same three places. The board's last complaint. The CEO's most recent frustration. A competitor's careers page. Demand generation, product marketing, brand, analyst relations, a team to build and a number to hit, ideally with nine years in your exact category and an existing relationship with your buyer.

That document describes a wish. It was written by people who had not yet worked out what was broken.

Here is the part nobody says out loud. Hiring senior is the one decision that feels like progress while postponing every other decision. The search runs four months. For four months nobody has to answer the uncomfortable question about the pipeline, because the answer is arriving in September.

Then the answer arrives, and inherits a plan they did not write.

The budget was set last autumn. The events were booked in January and the deposits are gone. The positioning was agreed in a workshop they were not invited to, because they did not work there yet. The number on their objectives was calculated by people who were, at the time, guessing.

Their first ninety days go to executing decisions made before anyone did the diagnosis. Then month seven arrives, the number is missed, and the board conversation is about whether you hired the right person.

I sat in an interview for exactly this role. I asked what they needed done. The answer was that they had a strong team and a solid plan, and no growth outside their existing client base.

So I asked the obvious follow up. You are hitting your numbers, but every new name comes through a partner. Nothing net new arrives from your own effort. Is that right?

Yes.

Then one more question. Have you asked your partners why they can sell your product when you cannot?

Nobody answered that one. I suggested we talk again in a couple of months.

They already had a plan. What they were hiring was someone to run it.

The diagnosis belongs before the hire. One written page is enough. What is actually broken, what evidence says so, and what would have to become true for it to be fixed. A page a candidate can argue with in the interview.

The candidate who argues with that page is the one you want. You cannot find out whether they would if the page does not exist.

Spencer Stuart put average CMO tenure in the S&P 500 at 4.1 years this January, the shortest of any core C-suite seat except the COO. Those are the best resourced marketing organisations in the world, with the deepest benches and the most patient boards. I have no equivalent figure for companies at €20M ARR, and I would not trust one if somebody handed it to me. What I have is what I keep watching, which is the same cycle running faster.

None of that comes from a shortage of good marketing leaders. It comes from hiring one as a substitute for deciding what is wrong.

One question worth sitting with this week: if your next VP Marketing started tomorrow morning, could you hand them a single page, written by you, describing the problem they are there to solve?

If you cannot write that page, they cannot solve it either.

Alex

P.S. The quicksand doesn't feel like failure. It feels like being very busy.