How to hire marketing professionals for your SaaS start-up

In this episode, Alan Gleeson explains how to hire marketing professionals. 
Alan is a Fractional Chief marketing officer, who specializes in working with SaaS start-ups. 

We talk about:

• Who your first marketing hire should be.
• Why you should consider working with freelancers as part of your strategy and what KPIs to measure. 
• The outlook for SaaS startups in 2022
• Key metrics to measure in your SaaS Start-up
• The interview process for hiring marketing professionals

This episode will set you up for success in 2022. 

Transcript

0:00:07.3 Marie Ryan: Welcome to Hiring Talent. I'm your host, Marie Ryan. In this podcast, CEOs, HR managers and recruiters share their insights to help you find talented employees. In this episode, Alan Gleeson explains how to hire marketing professionals. Alan is a Fractional chief marketing officer who specialises in working with SaaS startups. We talk about who your first marketing hire should be, why you should consider working with freelancers as part of your strategy, and what KPIs you should measure. The last couple of years have been tumultuous for everybody. Literally everybody. So what do you think is the outlook for startups in 2022?

0:00:57.5 Alan Gleeson: I think if you're in SaaS, it's a very attractive place to be because software-as-a-service is still a very immature category, and most verticals or most categories... It's still very much the early days, so I'm increasingly bullish about prospects for SaaS companies, there's still a lot of companies out there that are reliant on paper-based manual approaches, Excel, Google Sheets, and I think more and more people are recognising the value that SaaS can bring to different work processes and work flows that you have. So the early trench of SaaS companies are very much ones that were very broadly horizontal, and that could appeal to pretty much every vertical or sector, whereas now you're getting much narrower solutions. So a very long-winded answer, but I remain extremely optimistic and bullish about prospects for software and SaaS in particular, so that's my prediction for next year. I think it'll be one of growth and one of opportunity, but also navigating through an increasingly competitive landscape, so each SaaS company will have its own challenges around how to position for success within that context.

0:02:14.9 Marie Ryan: Yeah, there are still lots of opportunities for SaaS companies. What I always say to people is there's an app for everything. So for the developers, it's just figuring out a problem that hasn't been solved yet by software, if one such exists, or taking an existing model and making it better. So certainly, I'm sure there are lots of opportunities next year, And for companies that are starting out, what are the signs that it's time to invest in marketing?

0:02:43.9 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, great question Marie, I think it's a complicated question in a number of ways, so it depends whether you're bootstrapped or venture capital-backed, and then if you're VC-backed, in Ireland and in the UK, it means a very different thing to being VC-backed in the US. So in the US, you typically get checks that are 10 times larger, so it's an easy thing to say that you should throw as much marketing resource at it as soon as you can, but obviously there's commercial implications of it, and this is why SaaS is a fascinating area to work because there are unit economics at play. And in some ways, you gotta invest in sales and marketing upfront, and the payoff can take a number of years to payoff. What I would say is, I think you have to have some marketing input from very early stages, and even picking your domain name or getting a basic website or messaging on it, it's tempting to do just have the CEO organise those elements, but I think getting some specialist marketing advice early on is really important.

0:03:48.8 Alan Gleeson: So I'd be advocating getting it as soon as you've got some resources, but again, it could be freelance, it doesn't have to be full-time hire at that point. And then the other point to be aware of is in the early phases, you definitely don't wanna grow marketing person, so it's not about going crazy on lead gen, it's gotta be more on product marketing, so those early marketing areas for focus need to be on things like speaking to customers, understanding their pains, understanding whether the features that your solution has adequately solves for those pains, messaging it accordingly, and then positioning yourself in the marketplace, which would probably have other competitors there. So that's how I would think about those early stages.

0:04:31.4 Marie Ryan: So who do you think should be the first hire when companies are ready to invest in marketing?

0:04:39.9 Alan Gleeson: I think if you've got through that product... So right at the start as I mentioned, some freelance support, probably someone with product marketing experience initially. They're not 10 a penny, they're hard to find, so you might just get a freelance product marketing person to help you really track your initial phase of some initial messaging, making sure that you're understanding the pain of the market, that you're talking to as many customers or prospects as you can. And then when you're comfortable with that phase and perhaps you've got some cash flow from existing customers, perhaps you've taken a check, your first hire then probably needs to be a Jack or Jill of all trades, very much a generalist that can turn their hand on too many things.

0:05:22.2 Marie Ryan: So do you think that the companies starting out in marketing should begin with freelancers rather than establishing an in-house team or working with experienced agencies?

0:05:35.1 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, great point again, I would be advocating, again, it depends on the budget. If you've just raised a seed round of five million, you're gonna have a different approach than if you're bootstrapping, or if you've got a seed of 50k. So again, that's the dilemma you have and in my experience, mostly in the UK and Ireland is the teams are pretty small for the first few years often till you get to almost series B. So I think I'm not gonna advocate which is the best approach because it depends on cash flow, it depends on appetite for risk, investment, but the beauty of the freelance side is that you can, of course, dial it up or dial it down, you can bring in specialists as and when you need. And actually, that's the model that I work with very successfully with most of my clients, whereby I can bring people in, if I need a PPC expert, I can bring one in, if I need a visual design expert, I can bring one in, if I need a UI/UX specialist, and in those are early years, I tend to go to...

0:06:37.6 Alan Gleeson: And freelancers rather than consultancies largely because the freelancers are just a bit more affordable. And again, you're trying to protect cash flow, but I'm curious whether you have a view Marie. You're working in marketing in at HireHive, which is a fast-growing SaaS startup, you're a full-time hire. How would you view building it out, do you think that do you rely on freelancers or do you plan to build out your own team?

0:07:02.7 Marie Ryan: For your first hire, I think it's a good idea to hire someone with a marketing expertise, so whether that's a marketing executive and then you train, invest in training or hire a marketing manager and just let them off, let them be your key advisor. And then of course, there's your situation too, hiring an expert or a marketing consultant, a CMO to advise you. So you have that expertise. Freelance is great, but people often think that you can get freelancers very, very cheaply. So you'll see people going to Upwork and Fiverr and you often get what you pay for, whereas if you want a freelance SEO specialist, you will pay for it and you should pay for it, it's certainly less expensive than hiring an agency. But if you're gonna go down the freelance route, they are professionals, yeah, you get what you pay for. So that would be what I would think, and then like that, if you hire a marketing person, they'd be well-advised to say "This freelancer is charging too little, they're probably not as good as we think, whereas this freelancer is an expert, we should invest in them and pay a fair amount for their services."

0:08:15.4 Alan Gleeson: I think, yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I think the freelancers I use, they've got nice day rates, but they're experts in their field and I don't typically use an Upwork or Fiverr type play because I understand the value, particularly with B2B where I work, where you gotta have... It's picks the perfect. You don't get as many eyeballs to your websites as B2C companies, so therefore, you gotta bring these experts in and you're absolutely right, you've gotta pay but you recognise that the alternative is not a very palatable one and that you'll often have to fix things with some of the cheaper versions. And the other thing I think that's worth throwing into the mix is that you do need someone to do the execution, there's no point hiring a senior chief and having nobody to do the work, so I think that's the other nuance. You don't wanna bring in a freelancer or a chief marketing officer, if there's nobody to do what they recommend you do. Because what they will do is they'll create a list of things to do and you need someone to do it, you don't wanna be paying that senior resource to try and, I don't know, do a SEO on the website or to create illustrations for the landing pages. So that's an important point that you don't wanna bring that senior person in if there's nobody to do the delivery.

0:09:37.3 Marie Ryan: Yeah, I think sometimes people can speak to consultants and they get the advice, but then they've no one to implement it, so that could be a bit of a trap for people too.

0:09:47.7 Alan Gleeson: Absolutely, and it's an expensive one because you then get quite frustrated, 'cause the consultant, as they will do, if they're any good, will be interrogating the data, looking at Google Analytics, looking at Google Search Console, they'd be trying to come up with areas to improve. So they will come up with a long list of things that you need to fix, and yeah, it can be very frustrating then if you don't get the value. You learn more and you learn more about the problems, but you don't have a commercially valid way to fix it in the short term, so that's definitely one to watch.

0:10:23.1 Marie Ryan: Yeah, I think there is a temptation, particularly in smaller companies to say, after "I'll do that myself," so they might reach out to someone, get advice, and then literally not have the time to implement any of it. And if you do that across different departments, you have a tonne of advice, but you're not able to move any of it forward. So yeah, I think it's very important to have people to actually implement it and then pay accordingly and make sure the work is done.

0:10:49.8 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, but the other point that you've flagged, which is one to watch, is that people under-appreciate marketing. So often you'll get we can do it ourselves and I've seen classic cases, I've seen one example whereby they thought content was pretty straight forward, we just write some content. And they'd been blogging probably for two or three years, and on their website, without ever knowing this concept of search engine optimisation or SEO, and they hadn't... When I looked at Google Analytics, there was very little traffic, so for all that work and effort, they didn't understand meta titles, meta descriptions, h1s, URL optimization, internal linking, they thought content, this is easy, we'll go write some stuff. But the reality was Google Analytics showed nobody was reading the content because they weren't promoting it, but they hadn't instructionally set up in a way that meant that it was easy for Google to read, which meant it wasn't showing up in search engines. So it was a really an example of, it's not as obvious as it seems, and specialists will bring in that expertise that is needed because otherwise you can have a lot of wasted effort and that's just one example.

0:12:00.4 Marie Ryan: But in terms of marketing strategy, what are the vanity metrics that you see people focusing too much of their efforts on?

0:12:09.9 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, look, page impressions is one. And again, it comes from Google Analytics, and you're trying to use Google Analytics as a proxy for understanding the landscape. And really, page views, session times, a lot of the stuff actually you get in Google Analytics is vanity metrics. And the other issue that crops up that's linked to it, is that people don't appreciate this notion of filters. So if you've got a website and you look at Google Analytics, you think, "Okay, we've got 5000 views a month", but there will be bot traffic that needs to be filtered out, so there will be bots hitting the website. There might be a little sign-in button on your website, so there can be lots of people coming back to sign in on a regular basis. You could have an office of 100 people, they're all logging into the website or hitting the website on a daily basis. You could have traffic from places that you're not commercially active in it, so you'll get a lot of traffic from India, there's over billion people there, but it may not be a place that you've got a commercial offering that's valid. So the reality then is your traffic is probably way lower if you look at it through the lens of traffic that you could convert into a sale. So there are lots and lots of them out there, I think it's really trying to be as narrow as you can on a few conversion metrics.

0:13:30.9 Alan Gleeson: Back to a point that you mentioned earlier, actually Marie, is B2B SaaS is complicated, it's not just about attracting people to your site, you then need to convert them. So then can you get them converting to take a demo, or to start up, but then you gotta retain them, and you can't neglect that piece either, you wanna make sure that you're equally allocating your time and your priorities on making sure that you're not spending too much time on one and creating a leaky bucket where you're bringing in, let's say a lot of traffic and you're not really watching the conversions of it. Or maybe they're converting, but they're not sticking around, in which case they're churning, which is just a really bad scenario for you.

0:14:10.9 Marie Ryan: Yeah. So what are the most important conversion metrics or metrics in Google Analytics that you think SaaS companies should watch out for?

0:14:21.5 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, I mean, there's a number of things you can look at. I like to look at quite a few different things. So I'll look... Like geography is always interesting, to try and understand where people are coming from. And I do very rarely use it in isolation, so I will normally hook it up to Google Data Studio. I'll look at Google Search Console and in tandem, I'll look at Google Ads. So I'll try and blend it from a few different sources. And it kind of plays out to the very simple thing that you're trying to establish is "Where did that lead come from?" Or actually more specifically "Where did that sale come from?" So that's ultimately the area you need to focus on. So just say the sales team have closed a new lead, and you need to understand the attribution and where did that lead come from. And of course, it sounds like a very straightforward concept, it is not, it is a really, really challenging area. And of course one of the difficulties we have in Europe is a lot of the content that's written about things like attribution is coming from American authors whereby they're used to completely different context. The context is resource abundance versus resource constraints. So there might be five or 10 in their team. They're probably using the latest tech stacks. In Europe, you could have one or two in your team, you may not have a data scientist, you may not have the latest tech. So there's some of the things to think about.

0:15:46.5 Marie Ryan: One of the areas that people like to look at is where something came from, but that doesn't tell you the true picture. So like that if you got something, if you got a click from an ad and that wound up becoming a customer, that person wound up becoming a customer, "What led to them being there in the first place?", "What were they searching for?", "What problem were they trying to solve?" That I think is the key to marketing and any marketing strategy. "What problems are you solving for your customer?" and "What problem is the customer looking to solve?" They're not always exactly the same thing, like for example, in HireHive, we provide applicant tracking software. If you've never heard of that before, you're not gonna go to the search engine and say, "Give me applicant tracking software." You might look at things like "How do I reduce the time spent on recruitment?", "How do I improve interviewee's experience?" or something like that. So some marketers need to understand what problem their customers are trying to solve, then serve them, think about where they are and come up with content to reach them there in their language, I think.

0:16:56.2 Alan Gleeson: You're absolutely right, and one of the big problems with marketers, if you go back to the context I painted earlier is, we don't spend enough time on customer calls. It's the big problem because you got a thousand things to do. And that disconnect is all too obvious, people are more likely to spent time in Google Analytics than listening to calls. So one of the ways that I've hacked a fix for that is with most of my clients we have dedicated Slack channels. And sales and customer success would be mandated to start typing in, and messaging that they're hearing. So "What are they hearing on calls?" And interestingly, one client recently, we spotted things like keywords, so that they were using keywords and that we had not written content about. So we had a very streamlined process whereby as inquiries came in, we look at the nature of the inquiry. "What were they describing their pain is to your point? ", "What was the language they were using?" And then on the call notes, we were also capturing that data, which then fed into our calendar or editorial calendar.

0:18:01.4 Alan Gleeson: So I had a really great success recently whereby we identified some keywords that we hadn't any content on the website for, we hadn't been ranking for those keywords, 'cause we had no content for them, but we spotted the trend and number of people use that terminology. We then created content for it, we optimised it from an SEO point of view, and lo and behold, a couple of months later, it's on the first page of Google and bringing us in decent traffic. So I think you're absolutely right, that ability to understand the pain, understand the language and have marketing take that to create value is hugely important in terms of creating content. But that needs to be closed by this feedback loop from the front line, and if you can't get to sit on these calls because you've got other priorities, you gotta have an active Slack channel where and notes from calls are being dropped in that you can see them and then take action based on them.

0:18:58.0 Marie Ryan: Yeah, definitely. I think there needs to be cohesion and definitely communication and a relationship between marketing and sales, and marketing and customer success, so that the prospect and customers are all getting the same messaging. If that happens and if it's aligned, then your customers will become your biggest sales tool. And one thing I recommend, it's related to social proof. So you're obviously going to say that your business is brilliant, of course you would, you're paid to, your customers aren't. So when they're advocating and giving good reviews, that will do a lot more for the sales and marketing than you talking about how brilliant your company ever will. So if you're in a startup, you can speak to your customers and then get testimonials and reviews and try and write them as openly as possible so that you're not leading the conversation, they can say and write whatever they like. If you do that, you get really good social proof for your website that you can use as part of your blog content, your email strategy and social media, and possibly even YouTube, which is of course part of social media. Equally, you're getting their pain points, the words that they use, the problems that they were trying to solve and the way that they describe us. And then you can use that in your marketing and messaging. You'll get a lot more from that than you ever would from analytics or from analysing the data that's already on your website.

0:20:27.0 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, look, I'd agree. I think it's a great point. I'd go one step further, I think, use G2 or Capterra, pick one of those and decide which one of those is the one that you're gonna invest time in, because again, if you're a smaller company you can't do all of these. So pick one, and you may wanna even incentivize people. So I'll often do a 50 Euro donation to charity to incentivize because you do need to get the social proof up and people are very busy, so it's hard to get, right? It's also very important if your application is in one that's in the US, because Capterra, G2, GetApp, Software Advice, they tend to be kinda key and sites people to go to for categories that are quite busy. They will go there and try and understand what the reviews say. But you're right, you'll often see language crop up in the way the customers frame their answers, but you can also get insights from competitors. You can look at the competitors and see how people are messaging about them, what are the negative things that they're saying about them, which ultimately get back to, I think a really crux point that every SaaS startup nowadays is working in a category that is either busy, or it will get busy pretty quickly, and therefore, how do you stand out from the crowd because features become easy to replicate? So really then it's around positioning and messaging.

0:21:49.1 Alan Gleeson: And there are areas that are probably being neglected, it goes back to an earlier point in the call, they're often ones that might have been the CEO just type something out and stuck it up there, when actually it becomes very nuanced, and what you're trying to do is enable the buyer to navigate a very complex world, so you wanna make sure that they can understand how your solution meets their needs, but also how it compares against some of the other choices that they're comparing you against, particularly if there's a large, an incumbent in the room. So they are some of the things to think about.

0:22:20.7 Marie Ryan: And when you're setting up all of the marketing, how do you estimate a budget?

0:22:28.7 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, look, that's a really great question. And again, it depends on lots of things. So I kinda go back to the stage of life in your business, are you really in the early stages, are you more established and ready to scale up? Have you got a track record? If you've not got a track record, do you understand your unit economics? Do you understand your lifetime value? Do you understand your customer acquisition cost? And if you have some of those data points, you can then make a call on it, it depends on your cash flow and your funding. Are you VC-backed, are you bootstrapped? So these really are the things that you need to be thinking about, there's no easy way of just saying, "This is how you do it", because of course, you have to consider your own particular context. And 'cause we all want playbooks, we all want recipes, but the reality is, is that SaaS is so nuanced it depends on, does the growth trajectory of the company is the one that is organic? Or is there someone willing to write a check and underpin you and say, "You know what? We're not really interested in profit, we're interested in winner takes all, therefore, we wanna be extremely aggressive, we want you to buy up everything you can.

0:23:43.0 Alan Gleeson: So these are all the things, but I guess the answer to it is, it's gotta be in a discussion with the CFO or CEO rather than done in isolation, because if you try and do it in isolation, you can either put in too much budget, too less. And so you really gotta understand their motivations for the business, because of course the challenge is that the marketing and sales is upfront and the revenue comes in drips and drabs into the future. And that's why it stresses cash flow, and that's why unit economics is important, but that's why you need to be talking to the CFO to kinda unpack what's the best route for this.

0:24:18.1 Marie Ryan: Generally, how long does it take to see a return on investment for marketing investments?

0:24:24.6 Alan Gleeson: Again, there's no easy way to answer that because of course... What activity are you talking about, is it overall, What's the sales cycle like? What's the kind of pattern of behavior for users, do they come and use you for six months and disappear into the sunset, or do they stay with you for three, four, five years? So these are all the sort of things that you need to think about that all kinda play into it. What I would say though is, unfortunately marketing is a kind of a long-term game. So, there can be a disconnect quite quickly if there's an expectation of immediate results, and the content is a great example, as is outbound sales activity. So if you look at those two activities, outbound sales activity can also fit under the marketing umbrella, you gotta view them through a six to nine month window. You can't be writing a blog, no one expecting that it's gonna generate leads, in fact, it probably takes a year of consistent writing to get a return. But it goes back to the nuance that I mentioned earlier, if you don't understand the CEO or you don't understand the personas that you're writing for, and if you don't understand how to amplify and promote the content, it's gonna take you a lot longer.

0:25:38.5 Alan Gleeson: Similarly, if you wanna spin up some quick wins, you can put some cash into Google Ads which becomes a lot more easy to manage and attribute and probably get in more immediate return, but that is likely to be costly, expensive and it gives you more immediate payoff but a lot more expensive than a longer term content play. How do you think about it actually, Marie, I'm just curious as to how you think about measuring it?

0:26:03.9 Marie Ryan: Well, in terms of the turnaround, when I search for this, the standard stock answer provided by Google is six to nine months. For me, I take comfort in that because it means that I can share it with my boss and give myself that leeway. Generally, I found returns much quicker and there's gonna be signs that it's working really well, depending on whatever your strategy is. So if your strategy is, I'm going to do Google Ads, of course, you can see the results of in that very, very quickly. If your strategy is, I'm going to build our network on social media, you'll see the follower count, you'll see the clicks, you'll see the engagement, you'll see what people like and what people don't. So, I think you will get the signs much quicker if a strategy is working or not. But yeah, in terms of the transformation that marketing does, it does take a lot longer, six to nine months anyway, but for usually between a year and a year and a half to see the full effect of a marketing strategy, I think.

0:27:05.2 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, and look, you spend things in parallel, you don't pick just one, if you have the capacity, you keep a number of things going. Like these podcasts are an example there. The payoff may not be immediate but the point is they help create content, they create value, people listen, people understand, people engage with the content, they see that HireHive is interested in educating the target audience that will be interested in applicant tracking system, whether you can attribute it back to it and in a few months, who knows, right? But that's kind of part of the journey, you can't just rely on Google ads as the only means to bring in leads and traffic.

0:27:45.1 Marie Ryan: Yeah, and for me, I've always found it effective if you create useful and helpful content, as opposed to being overly salesy. So that will be part of why we create blogs and podcasts, so that hopefully people will find it useful. And when they listen to it, they'll be able to take something away that they can use in their own rules.

0:28:05.3 Alan Gleeson: Right.

0:28:06.3 Marie Ryan: I've found that they're really overly advertising things like, we're brilliant look at us, people tend not to engage with it and it turns people off right away. So in terms of an overall SaaS marketing strategy, I'd focus on the customer, focus on what they're interested in, their persona and create content around them, then eventually, you'll engage with them. And I think you'll do a lot more for your brand than you would through PPC ads.

0:28:33.1 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, I mean, I'd take it one step further, right? I think there's two philosophies that I kind of take is one is, can you get your ideal customer profile promoted? Right? So can you help them get promoted? Right? So if they buy your solution, and it deployed successfully and save lots of time and save lots of cost, they may get promoted. Secondly, can you fix problems they have? Like it's all about helping people solve problems. If they're your philosophies, you'll go a long way, if you're looking for a quick buck, you're in the wrong business. So B2B SaaS, the North Star for me, personally is help solve problems and get them promoted. Simple as that, working on that and producing content that kind of sits in those two buckets. Because you're not in the business of newsworthy content or making people laugh. I mean, content has different forms, right? B2B SaaS content typically sits in an education bucket. So if the broad kind of attempt is education, go even narrower, help them fix the problems that they have, or help them get promoted. Having those two as your north star kind of content pillars will get you a long way.

0:29:44.1 Marie Ryan: Yeah, of course, I'm familiar with the concept of solving a problem, but I hadn't considered getting the person promoted. And that's really interesting. So basically, you want to help the person to look good in front of their boss?

0:29:56.1 Alan Gleeson: Absolutely, I'm sorry, I borrowed that example I think from Tom Thomas, who's US VC. And he talks about being in the business of selling promotions. And I think he uses in the context of sales, but I think it equally applies to marketing. That if you look at it through that lens, you wanna help the buyer look well in front of the boss, but how do they look well, by making a sensible decision, that backer right piece of software, they've deployed it successfully and they're getting value from it, and they do that with other things, then they're more likely to be on a growth trajectory within their career. So that's kind of the philosophy, which I think is a good one.

0:30:33.3 Marie Ryan: When you're hiring people in marketing for your SaaS startup. What qualities do you typically look for?

0:30:42.8 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, I mean, there's a few, right? Get stuff done. Like startups in B2B SaaS are not for everybody, right? Let's just kind of also just speak about that for a second. They are high octane, high energy, demanding, resource constrained and exhilarating, lots of autonomy to the real mix bag, right? But they're not for everybody. And I remember one pretty unsuccessful hire I had earlier in my career. They were treating it as more like a grad program where they were gonna spend lots of time on research, where the reality of it is that, we needed to make sales, right? We needed to generate leads. So for me this bias for action, get stuff done, ability to prioritize and a real passion for what you do. They're the kind of qualities that I look for. I'm not really that interested in academic credentials. But I am interested in a digital footprint, right? If they wanna work in Marketing and SaaS I wanna see that they've got a website or they've got a social media account or that they've got a decent looking LinkedIn account or they've taken some credentials from HubSpot or Google to demonstrate that they're serious about their career.

0:31:58.1 Marie Ryan: So you'd look at either the work they've done or the work they're willing to do and possibly ask them to complete a project during the interview process, right?

0:32:06.5 Alan Gleeson: I do a few simple things, right? I'll usually ask them. So if we talk about content, what you get sometimes it's quite funny, right? People are great at everything, right? And they're good at Google ads and they're good at analytics. And so I'll often say, "Look, just send me through your last two blogs if you can by 5 o'clock this evening." And some people don't do it. And if they don't do it, that's a filter for me, right? It was a simple instruction. If you didn't know, my email, ask me my email, but it was on the calendar invite. If you've written two good blogs, just send them to me. If you haven't, don't. So that's kind of harsh, but I need to see evidence, right? In these early stages when you're hiring someone. They don't have much work experience for the junior hires. But people can do courses, you can do HubSpot courses for free. You can do Google Ads courses for free. You can do Google Analytics courses for free. You can write a blog on Medium, they're the sort of skills you're gonna need in a B2B SaaS role. So I need to see evidence of them, because you can do them now. These environments are kind of quite demanding, right? I find them very exhilarating, but they're demanding and you don't really have time for huge amounts of learning on the job.

0:33:22.5 Alan Gleeson: Of course, there will be learning for the early hires, right? But, can you write or can you not write? If you can write let's see some evidence, right? So there's some of the things, I'm less interested in your academics, I'm more interested in what I call the digital footprint. If I google you can I find a couple of things you've written or can I find a website or can I find on your LinkedIn that you've got some courses taken, if I can't, you know, I'll rather talk to the candidate that's come in half an hour later or that may not have gone to a college, but has got their own website and they've written some content, there's a point of view on it, and they've got a good LinkedIn account with lots of connections and they've got some credentials up there. You could ask them, who do they listen to in podcast related to marketing and what blogs do they read? And again, you should be hearing things like Eric Siu or Neil Patel or Avinash or whoever. So you wanna try. And why this? Because the reality is, is that these are tough environments. You're hiring somebody in a resource constraints context, whereby you need to get stuff done. It's not a grad program, you don't have huge amounts of time as a manager, it is very time pressed, as you know. There's a prioritization list with pose and some probably things that need to get done, and this is kind of the point.

0:34:39.7 Alan Gleeson: SaaS and B2B is complicated, it's exhilarating, it's exhausting, it's a real mix of things, and you've gotta be fairly tough on these initial kinda pre-screening interviews because it's not for everybody. And of course, in the early days, people aren't equipped enough to understand whether it's for them and you gotta be fair to them too, because it's not in anybody's interest to kinda be in a role that's just not really cut out for them.

0:35:11.0 Marie Ryan: How do you hire digital marketing professionals?

0:35:14.5 Alan Gleeson: So what are some things I do, I think your network is key, I think trying to forge relationships with local universities and colleges is important, to using your network, do you use an agency or a recruiter? I mean, I'm afraid not, I don't think so, right? Look, local recruitment is a very competitive market, there's lots and lots out there, so how do you know which recruiter to go with? And I've seen Cork, if it's Cork, is it remote? Is it Dublin? It's not easy. But it can be done. I have hired a number of B2B SaaS people over the years in Ireland and in the UK. I think the key is you just make concessions and things. So you might be looking for B2B, you might be looking for SaaS, you might be looking for someone that's had a digital marketing background in some capacity, you might be looking for someone that's from the industry you're in. And you might be lucky to get one of those four. So then you're really hiring on expectation. So you're looking for things like a fast learner, and then you're looking for all the competencies that I talked about earlier, so you're literally making concessions saying, You know what? There are just not that many out there that are B2B SaaS marketing from your industry with three or four years, and therefore you're looking at sort of trying to make concessions.

0:36:43.8 Alan Gleeson: You could go direct in some instances too, and if you had people in comparable sectors and you thought actually, you just make a direct approach and say, actually, maybe that person's two years in a junior marketing role, maybe there is a Head of marketing in situ, therefore, they may not be willing to wait the years to get to that senior role, so maybe you approach them.

0:37:06.9 Marie Ryan: How do companies without marketing expertise, hire marketing professionals?

0:37:12.8 Alan Gleeson: How do people hire marketing... I think this is where a freelancer could come in to help. You do need someone to help shape that initial hire. So it goes back to my earlier point around, I see crazy stuff, right? People looking for a growth hackers, and they're six-months-old, and I'm like, Okay, you raised a seed check, but a growth hacker is not the person that you need. At this stage, you don't have a product in the marketplace, you need a different skillset. So I think, my message is, get access to somebody that is in B2B SaaS marketing and get them to give you some steer as to what you're looking for. I'll give you another example, which I think is, again, the sorts of things that can happen is, you can put a role out there and you can be seduced by people coming from the Googles and the LinkedIns and the Apples of this world, the reality is that they're the worst hire for your B2B SaaS company because they're coming from resource abundance into resource constraint. They're coming from being a tiny cog in a huge wheel to needing to be autonomous. They're coming from a template and playbook that's been around, and is sent over from the US to having to write their own one.

0:38:29.5 Alan Gleeson: So there are some of the pitfalls that you can fall into if you haven't had this external perspective from somebody that knows the context. Look at the starting point, it could be just a couple of chats with people in your network. So like everybody use your network effectively, search those people that are in your network that can help you. I think it goes back to an earlier point in the conversation, that marketing is viewed very different from technology. A CEO is gonna think of technology in a different way, I don't really know about it, therefore, I'm gonna have to do a different route in terms of hiring, so I'm making assumptions that the CEO is a non-technical founder. And then they think with marketing, "Oh, I kinda get this roughly, so therefore it doesn't have to be like technology, I don't really need to worry about the spec, we can just hire anybody." And that's I guess is the key key point that I'm making is that it is a specialist discipline and, therefore, it needs due consideration and it needs to be something that you get input in, because otherwise, going back to my earlier point, you can bring in some junior marketing person and you have no clue if they're doing a good job or if they're doing a bad job.

0:39:36.1 Alan Gleeson: You just see a blog on the site, you have no idea if they've done SEO on it, whether they've used the right content management system, whether they've indexed it in Google Search Console, whether they're promoting it. You have no way knowing it. So this is what I'm getting at, is that you need to have someone in the wheelhouse that can at least have a conversation and give you a steer. It doesn't have to be a fully fledged paid consultant, but all you need to know is that it's not as straight forward as you may think, and therefore, it's not a quick fix, quick, fast track, let's just get anybody in, someone that's coming out of college, let's just slot them in. And I see it. I see it happening. 'Cause they think it's just write a blog and we're done and just change a few things on the site, but the point is it's a lot more sophisticated than that, and then you suffer at your peril if you choose to go down a route that isn't really thinking of marketing as a specialist discipline that's very nuanced. Look, I see it, people don't have Google Analytics installed or they don't have Google Search Console or they've never looked at it, they don't know what it is.

0:40:43.3 Alan Gleeson: And it's fine, they may not need to, but somebody needs to know. Because I go back to my old story of, you could be blogging for two or three years, and if you have done it properly, you're likely to see strong organic growth. So you know what your keywords are, you've optimized for them, you got a deliberate content strategy. You use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to help you navigate the content world. Or the alternative is someone junior is just throwing up some blogs and the box is being ticked that we're producing content. Very, very different scenarios. One will help you succeed, one is really working. And managing metric point is doing work but without really measuring the output or the impact.

0:41:22.3 Marie Ryan: Yeah. For me, the biggest determiner of success in SaaS marketing is two things. It's consistency and patience. It takes a long time to see the results. And if you don't have marketing expertise in hand and you hire somebody junior, if you're not seeing those fast quick wins, you might change tack. And then if you don't see fast quick wins there, you'll change again and again. And there's a danger that you'll never stick at any one thing long enough to see the return on investment or to see it be successful.

0:41:56.9 Alan Gleeson: It's a brilliant point. Tenure for marketing leads is two years probably at most. It's one of the motivations as to why I went out into freelancing because I could see that there was always this VC-backed... B2B SaaS will typically have investment. I know HireHive is probably slightly different, but most will have some sort of VC backing because the unit economics are such that you burn cash and as you grow, you wanna go faster, you burn more cash. So that's an external party that are gonna put demands on the CEO, which there'd be demands and leads and sales, and it will come back to marketing. But you're right, marketers get churned out way too quickly and unprompted up reasons. And it's a bugbear of mine when they can be doing phenomenal jobs, but they're often the fall guy or girl because they're usually not the co-founder. The co-founder may be a commercial lead like a CEO, or it could be a tech lead. So yeah, so that's one of the things. And I sometimes shudder when people move marketers on too quickly 'cause you lose the domain expertise as well. I'd been in scenarios where we've been hiring candidates that are way inferior to the candidate that was moved on, and you lose the expertise as well. So it is a very interesting one, I think, to say the least.

0:43:26.5 Marie Ryan: It sounds like marketing is being scapegoated in those cases, as in the investors aren't getting the results they want, so they just blame marketing and then cover themselves for another six months or so to get more funding, right?

0:43:40.5 Alan Gleeson: Well, there's a bit of a dance. You're in an interesting area. That's what I would call the product-sales-marketing dance. So, if the product is truly phenomenal and it's got a clear position in the marketplace and it's top quadrant in Gartner, or is G2 five-stars all the way, and is a category leader, interesting to market in that world. If it's missing lots of core features, or is inadequate in some way compared to its peers, hard to market in that situation. So there typically is a dance. Blame culture is the wrong way, but it can be quite tricky whereby sales want more leads or they want better quality, and marketing might be budget-constrained, it might be resource-constrained, the product may not be there. So there's this dance that goes on. I'm sounding quite negative on it, but the reality is, you've used this phrase a few times, it's patience. SaaS companies take a while to go, they take a time to get there. And this is where there's an inherent flaw in the model, is that there's this short-term commercial pressure versus the reality of the marketplace.

0:44:55.2 Alan Gleeson: And look, I'm very commercial and I'm very data-driven, but it's nuanced and it is an ongoing dialogue needed with the commercial team or the C-suite to keep the dialogue going and explain the context. But the good news is that the general trend is for fast growing, SaaS is fast growing, and there's the good-unit economics and there's good growth opportunities. And when it does work out, you're on a flywheel to success. It's just that it can be painful in the early years where you're trying to manage cash flow and expectations and the commercial realities of the need for growth, so it is very finely balanced.

0:45:43.3 Marie Ryan: And after your first hire, how do you know when it's time to scale the team and hire more people?

0:45:51.0 Alan Gleeson: Yeah. Again, the conversation with CFO and CEO, because each hire could throw 50k or 100k onto books. When you bundle everything in, and there is an argument that most SaaS companies, when they look back, those successful ones hired more aggressively. They were less conservative and they hired more aggressively. So they hired before the indicators were telling them that it was time to hire. So what I would say is, it is a very difficult hiring environment I mentioned earlier. So you've gotta hire earlier. But if you need a short-term boost from freelancers, there are agencies that can help spike leads, if that's what you're trying to do, and the other thing I think is, if you're beginning to see decent traction. So if you're getting a decent volume of inbounds, and you got a clear proposition that's resonating with the market, I think that's a signal then to really put the boots down in terms of your marketing. But again, it goes back to, there're different issues that you need to reflect upon, there could be an American well backed VC, well backed VC like company in your space, and you probably wanna avoid going toe to toe with them, because paid acquisition and branding come in to play and they're expensive.

0:47:16.0 Alan Gleeson: So this is why a lot of my answers are, it really depends on the context, it's very hard to give broad brush generalisations, you gotta think about certain ideas, but you gotta then view them through your own lens. So again, things like, are you well backed, do your VCs believe it's a winner takes all type environment, in which case they're willing to invest for growth, without worrying about profitability? Or is it a case where you have to grow profitably, in which case you gotta really manage cash flow? So there's some of the things to be thinking about.

0:47:52.8 Marie Ryan: Great, and when you're hiring for a marketing role, how long does it typically take?

0:48:00.6 Alan Gleeson: I would typically say a three to six month window, but again, the range can be either way, depending on how well networked you are, how well you're connected, and also if you have an employer brand or not. So again, if you're really early, you may have a very weak online digital footprint, so you're gonna struggle to attract top talent, particularly in Ireland, there's an awful lot of people joining the likes of Salesforce, LinkedIn, Apple, huge amounts going into those sort of companies. So it will depend on where you're located, how attractive the comp plan is, and how aggressive you go, whether you use paid tools to get in front of people whether there's bounties, whether you're willing to go direct.

0:48:49.9 Marie Ryan: What should the interview process look like for marketing roles?

0:48:54.0 Alan Gleeson: I typically use, again, a freelancer to do the initial piece for me. So they will do the job posting, they will do the promotion through different channels, they'll use an ATS like HireHive or equivalent. So I tend to outsource that piece, obviously, I'll contribute to it in terms of what we're looking for, but I will typically try and have them do that piece of work. I'll have them do an initial discovery call to check things like salary expectation, availability, where they're located, those sort of things. So then I'm really only getting past a few candidate CVs with notes from calls to then help me short list. We'll do a call, I tend not to really go through CVs, in terms of on the call, so it's not a case of, tell me what you did here or looking at your academic credentials. It's more around what I'd call a competency based call, Can they articulate that they understand what we're looking for? Then I'll do that little test that I mentioned at the start of the call, just a simple heuristic, those that reply, great they've listened to a simple instruction, they've acted upon it. Those that don't, or miss the deadline, that ain't gonna cut it, you need some harsh heuristics like this, where you can't then function otherwise.

0:50:15.8 Alan Gleeson: And then, there'll often be sometimes the CEOs. If it's early the CEOs will want to talk to them, often that would be in-house at that point, we're all working remotely at the moment, but that would be a face-to-face. But there's usually a few tasks, I have a list of five or six tasks that I typically provide, and again, the recruiter freelance person would run those so the candidate would need to come in for an hour or two to do those, it could be including writing a blog. So it'll be here's a title for a blog, you got an hour, let's see how you get on. Because again, a lot of the roles are content-based and you need to validate that they can at least conceptualise a decent structure that they can produce something in a time, time constrained manner. I might get them to do a Loom video critiquing the website, to see do they understand the basic requirements of a well-functioning website, so there's some of the tasks that I'll typically set to try and help get the right candidate.

0:51:21.9 Marie Ryan: Yeah, I like the idea of sending them those tasks. So you mentioned blog and Loom video. What are the other three?

0:51:32.9 Alan Gleeson: If it's more technical, I might let them have access to Google Analytics and get them to do a review and see what insights that they can garner from that. I try and get them to critique the messaging, do they understand the proposition? Did they see the value in it? Do they understand the marketplace? I'm trying to think the other couple of my list, I don't have them to hand, but it's generally aligned with the role, trying to understand, Can you write is a key piece, and then can you at least demonstrate some understanding of how a B2B SaaS website should work? Another thing, I will often ask them to really explain is what we do, and again, it depends which client I'm working for, and that's not in front of an internet camera. Can they give a decent explanation as to what the core proposition is? In a busy world where they might be trying to apply for lots and lots of roles, you do wanna just be clear that they've at least a rudimentary understanding of the broad category that you're in, and your site in what it's standing for.

0:52:47.6 Marie Ryan: Yeah, interesting. On the other hand, and this was the dark side of that, is if you're interviewing a range of people, if you interviewed 10 marketing candidates and none of them are able to describe what it is that you do, you need a marketing person. [chuckle]

0:53:04.6 Alan Gleeson: Yeah, no, no, no, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. The tricky thing is, and that's the other problem, particularly in Ireland, you're probably not gonna get 10 candidates. So this is the other challenge, you're trying to select from probably three or four. The other quality actually worth mentioning is they gotta be asking questions. It's a real key element for me because you gotta ask questions to learn. Things aren't always clear, so it's gotta be a dialogue, a conversation, not very much a monologue for me.

0:53:40.9 Marie Ryan: Yeah, yeah, they have to be curious, because you want them to figure out the customers, what makes the customers tick, why they engage with certain things and why they don't engage with others. So they do need that curiosity and inquisitiveness at the start. And what's the number one mistake you see SaaS companies making when they hire marketing people?

0:54:02.5 Alan Gleeson: I think we touched on this earlier in the call, Marie, so I think it relates to probably hiring from, like, when I see things like Growth Hacker for a company that's just raised some change and they don't have a product market fit, they don't have a product that's in the marketplace in a defined category, and I'm like "hmm". So I think it goes back to this product marketing piece, or at least that initial tranche of work has to be, "We have these assumptions, we need to validate the assumptions. To validate them we need to talk to people that we believe represent the personas or the ideal customer profiles that we're gonna target. We can't be in a rush to try and sell. We gotta learn first and talk to people." I mean, I were working in a role once whereby I was new to the area, and I'm based in London, so I simply went into LinkedIn and I put in, let's say the word procurement. Procurement connections, London, came up with five or six names, and I went to meet them all, I bought them coffee, I bought them lunch, I didn't sell to one of them. That wasn't the objective, it was for me to understand how do people like them buy, how do they see the world from their side of the fence. So that's the one thing I see, that the problem is the people skip that step and they go straight into, "Let's go and go crazy trying to bring in leads" without doing the step of understanding the ideal of customer.

0:55:23.8 Marie Ryan: What's your favourite to ask in interviews?

0:55:27.7 Alan Gleeson: My favourite question in interviews? Well, I like the one, "Just tell me about yourself," I think otherwise, it can be very robotic and it can be very focused on competencies and trying to unpack whether they're fit for the role, but actually learning a little bit about the person and trying to understand their context and it's a very open-ended question. So you can take it in all different directions, so I quite like that one, and then of course, if I was being hard-nosed about what question is sort of best to try and help make a decision, I think it's the one about when you set them a simple task, it's a little test to see, are they gonna actually deliver on what they are being asked, right? And it's easy, as you said earlier, it's easier to talk about stuff in the future, but a very little task is an escalation of commitment. Do they listen, do they understand the task and do they actually take action on them? You know by 5 o'clock that evening, well, I always ask them by 5 o'clock, "Just send me the two blogs you've written that you're most proud of", because they'll have talked about content they've written, so it's not like it's a huge task, it's like literally cut and paste into a browser, type in my email, get it to me before 5.

0:56:44.7 Alan Gleeson: Lots of people don't do it. And then, Is that being hard-nosed? I don't know. Whenever I work with recruiters, they're pretty happy with that approach. You need a way to try and try and validate if someone is gonna be doing what they say they'll do, and that's as easy a test as any, right?

0:57:01.7 Marie Ryan: Thanks very much for speaking to me today. It was really useful. I certainly learned a lot about hiring marketing people for SaaS startups.

0:57:14.6 Alan Gleeson: Great, thanks so much Marie, delighted to have been on the show. Thanks so much for taking your time.

0:57:18.8 Marie Ryan: Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to the Hiring Talent podcast. We hope you enjoyed this. If you want more content like this, be sure to subscribe and visit our site hirehive.com.