Assembling a team of marketing all stars is no easy task! You have to screen for lots of different specialities, like SEO, demand generation and social media. Then you have to compete for the best talent, which isn't always easy... and all of that effort is wasted if you don't have the right organizational structure for new (and existing) hires to thrive.
Learn how to build and scale a modern marketing team, with the skill sets needed to run high performing inbound campaigns. This slide deck covers how to find and hire top marketing talent, how to structure your organization for Inbound at any size, and tips on management and incentives.
Exploring Web 3.0 Growth marketing: Navigating the Future of the Internet
Building and Scaling an Inbound Marketing Team
1. BUILDING & SCALING
AN INBOUND TEAM
Tips on hiring, organizational
structure, and management.
Mike Volpe
CMO @ HubSpot
2. WELCOME
I joined HubSpot in 2007 as the fifth
employee. I love chocolate, lead
generation, whiskey, Excel, red wine,
marketing metrics and Jay Z.
Mike Volpe
CMO @ HubSpot
@mvolpe
mvolpe@hubspot.com
3. AGENDA
1 Characteristics
2 Sourcing
3 Screening and Interviewing
4 Organizational Structure
5 Management and Incentives
5. HIRING FOR INBOUND MARKETING
• Digital
• Smart
• Analytical
• GSD
• Reach
• Content
6. DIGITAL
Look for people who speak
“digital” without an accent.
Digital natives or immigrants
are both fine as long as they
have full digital citizenship.
7. ANALYTICAL
Everyone should be more
analytical than the average
person in their role elsewhere.
Even a writer should want to
measure their content using
metrics and be interested in
judging their success that way.
8. REACH
Good inbound marketers leave
evidence that they have a
gravitational attraction.
They have done something that
“attracted” people to them or
their work before.
9. CONTENT
Find people who create content
naturally.
You do not want content
creation to be a struggle.
10. SKILLS BY FUNNEL STAGE
Attract Convert Close
Key Skills
• Blogging
• Social Media
• SEO
• Writing, Design,
Creative
D A R C
Key Skills
• Optimization: LPs,
CTAs, Workflows
• Analytics
• Lead Scoring
D A R C
Key Skills
• Product expert
• Teacher / trainer
• User testing
• Messaging
• Persuasion
D A R C
12. SOURCING MARKETING HIRES
Always be hiring.
• Referrals
• Conferences
• Networking events
• Online networking
• LinkedIn
Keep a list of the top 10-30
marketers you think are A+
players and stalk / nurture them.
14. SCREENING CANDIDATES
Scan the application / resume
• No AOL or Hotmail email addresses and no paper resumes
• Demonstrated track record of success and growth
• Domain expertise and inbound marketing experience / certifications
Google their name
• Strong LinkedIn presence, check for mutual connections
• Decent sized digital footprint
• Decent quality digital footprint
16. THE FUNNEL QUESTION
“Pretend you're the CMO for this
company, and you have to
decide on what your marketing
team should focus. What do
you do?"
25,000 Visitors
250 Leads
100 Sales Ready
Leads
25 Opportunities
5 Customers
17. THE LEAD SCORING QUESTION
“I just emailed you an Excel file of 10,000 leads with data like company
size and industry for each of them, and you can see the 200 leads that
became customers. How can you use that data to make a lead score
to help us prioritize leads in the future?”
18. THE WEBSITE HOMEPAGE QUESTION
“The CEO likes version A,
the COO likes version B,
and the company is evenly
divided. Which homepage
do you launch?”
Millions Love Our Company
Text text text Text text
Text text text Text text
Text text text Text text
Text text text Text text
Text text text Text text
[Video]
Make More Money With Us
• Text text text Text text
text Text text text Text
text text text text
• Text text text Text text
text Text text text
• Text text text Text text
text Text text text Text
[Picture 1]
[Picture 2]
20. MARKETING ORG BY TEAM SIZE
Team = 1 Team = 3 Team = 9 Team = 18
Attract, Attract
Convert +
Close
Convert
Close
OR
Attract = 2
Convert +
Close
Attract = 5
Blog = 2
Offers = 1
SEO/SM = 1
Design = 1
Convert = 2
Close = 2
Attract = 9
Blog = 3
Offers = 2
SEO/SM = 2
Design = 2
Convert = 6
By Persona,
Geo or Sales
Team
Close = 3
PM / SE Split, or
by Prod.
21. HUBSPOT MKTG ORG OVER TIME
2012
(25 ppl)
2009
(8 ppl)
2007
(2 ppl)
2014
(70 ppl)
VP
• Lead gen &
inbound
background
• Management of
15
College Grad
• 2 internships
• Generalist
ToFU Team
• 3 people
MoFu Team
• 3 people
Teams by
Channel (email,
blog, social)
MoFu Teams by
Personas
Prod Mktg
VP/Dir Content
VP/Dir Funnel
VP/Dir Product Mktg
VP/Dir Brand & Buzz
(detail on next slide)
22. HUBSPOT MARKETING ORG IN 2014
Dir. Product
Mktg (~12)
VP Funnel
(~30)
VP Content
(~12)
Dir. Brand &
Buzz (~13)
Results / Metrics
• Website visitors
• New contacts
generated
Activity
• Blog articles
• Ebooks & webinars
• Other content
Results / Metrics
• Marketing pipeline
• Sales goal %
Activity
• Lead nurturing
• Lead scoring
• Sales alignment
• Optimization
Results / Metrics
• Sales test scores
• % sales selling
various features
Activity
• Product content
• Sales enablement
Results / Metrics
• PR hits
• Event #s and feedback
• Satisfaction of others
Activity
• PR & Events
• Creative: Videos,
graphics, design
Attract Convert Close
23. MONTHLY CADENCE FOCUSED ON OUTCOMES
Goals for month
set by CMO
Team decides
on activities
Team executes
on activities
CMO Feedback
to Teams
Team reports on
metrics / activity
24. THANK YOU
I joined HubSpot in 2007 as the fifth
employee. I love chocolate, lead
generation, whiskey, Excel, red wine,
marketing metrics and Jay Z.
Mike Volpe
CMO @ HubSpot
@mvolpe
mvolpe@hubspot.com
25. GET A FREE INBOUND
MARKETING ASSESMENT
hubspot.com/enterprise-assessment
26. Related Content for Further Reading
How to Hire Great Marketing Interns:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32649/How-to-Recruit-Evaluate-Rockstar-Marketing-Interns.aspx
How to Screen for Marketing Talent:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33999/How-the-HubSpot-CMO-Screens-for-Top-Marketing-Talent.aspx
Interview Questions for Inbound Marketers:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34000/7-Real-Marketing-Interview-Questions-From-HubSpot-s-CMO.aspx
How to Build a Modern Marketing Team Kit:
http://www.hubspot.com/modern-marketing-team-kit/
Netflix Culture Deck:
http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
HubSpot Culture Deck:
http://www.CutureCode.com
My Marketing Metrics / Analytics Deck:
http://bit.ly/MVmetrics
Editor's Notes
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33999/How-the-HubSpot-CMO-Screens-for-Top-Marketing-Talent.aspx
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32649/How-to-Recruit-Evaluate-Rockstar-Marketing-Interns.aspx
When I'm doing these initial audits, some of my personal pet peeves I look our for are (1) people who have an email address with hotmail.com, aol.com, or an ISP like Verizon or Comcast, and (2) people who don't have a personalized URL for their LinkedIn profile. While these things might not get a candidate eliminated for sure, they do indicate a lack of proficiency with inbound marketing. Similarly, I prefer when a candidate's resume is in a PDF file (not a Word doc), when the candidate includes a link to his or her LinkedIn profile in the email text, and when the text of their cover letter is in the text of the email -- not in an attachment. Those things indicate to me that the applicant is proficient in how people use the web and that they thought about making their credentials easily accessible to me. Finally, while a paper resume sent via snail mail to my office will get through the clutter (I do open non-junk mail), it's not ideal because I can’t forward the piece of paper or share it with others easily.
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34000/7-Real-Marketing-Interview-Questions-From-HubSpot-s-CMO.aspx
The Question: "Draw a funnel on the whiteboard showing 10,000 visitors, 500 leads, 50 opportunities, and 10 new customers (or any other numbers you think are interesting). Now pretend you're the CMO for the company, and you have to decide what your marketing team should do to improve their marketing."
The Follow-Up: Typically, the candidate will pick one part of the funnel to focus on. If they don't, I like to push them to do just that. Once they pick one area, I question them on exactly what the team should do to improve that part of the funnel. And I don’t just want them to tell me to "improve the visitor to lead conversion rate" -- they need to tell me how. What are all the different tactics they would try? Do they have any creative ideas? Are their ideas really ways to improve that part of the funnel, or are they just generic, high-level marketing concepts? Then tell them to pretend they've implemented their ideas and ask them to go back through the whole funnel and explain how they think each of those initial metrics have changed. If you have time, you can also dive into other parts of the funnel.
What to Look For: Here, you're looking to see how the candidate thinks about the funnel, if they have an intuitive sense of what good and bad conversion rates are, and if they understand how the funnel steps are connected. You also want to see if they understand which different tactics you can use at each step to improve that particular step. (For instance, if they say the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate is bad, the right answer is not to write more blog articles.) I also like to see if they understand that when you make changes to the funnel, conversion rates might change beyond the specific step you worked on. For instance, increasing the visitor-to-lead conversion rate might lower the conversion rate from lead to opportunity.
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34000/7-Real-Marketing-Interview-Questions-From-HubSpot-s-CMO.aspx
The Question: "Assume you have an Excel spreadsheet with 10,000 leads from a few months back -- long enough that those leads' sales cycle has passed. The file contains information about each lead, such as their industry, title, company size, and what they did to become a lead (e.g. downloaded an ebook). Also in the file is whether they closed as a customer, and how much their order was for. Can you use this information to create a lead score? How would you do it?"
The Follow-Up: Most people will start to talk about “looking at the data” and “sorting the data.” Push them to tell you how they would do that in Excel, or in another program if they prefer something else. It's not practical to just "look" at the data when you have 10,000 rows; you need to use statistical analysis. They also might zone in on one factor, perhaps industry, all alone. If they do that, you should ask them what they would say if the small companies in one industry are good leads, but the big companies in another industry are also good leads? Basically, just keep pushing them until they're at a loss for what to do next.
What to Look For: The goal of this question is to see how far they can go and how sophisticated they can think about lead quality. Most people don't get very far and are unwilling or unable to look at more than one variable at a time, or understand how to analyze a lot of data in a simple way. At a minimum, you want to find people who look at the leads who closed in one group and compare them to the leads who did not close, look at multiple variables at a time, and use statistical functions in Excel or another program to do that (summary tables, pivot tables, etc.). If you find someone who starts making a coherent argument about why you might want to use logistic regression, factor or cluster analysis, actuarial science, or stochastic modeling to figure this out ... refer them to me, and I will buy you and a friend a really nice steak dinner if I hire them!
Note: I often start this question by simply asking, “How should you create a lead score?” This is how I sort out the people wrongly brainwashed by the marketing automation industry. Anyone who answers, “You make a lead score by talking to the sales team and then assigning 5 or 10 points to each of the things they say they want,” is wrong. That is not a data-driven approach tolead scoring, and it is way too simplistic to work effectively in most cases.
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34000/7-Real-Marketing-Interview-Questions-From-HubSpot-s-CMO.aspx
The Question: "We have two potential designs for the homepage of our website, but we don’t know which one to use. The CEO likes one, and the COO likes another. Half the company likes one, and the other half of the company like the other. Which one should we use?"
The Follow-Up: If they pick one and give you a reason, ask them what the goals are for the homepage. Then ask them how they would determine which homepage meets those goals best. Then tell them one of the homepages performed well based on one of the criteria, and the other one performed well in terms of another one of the criteria. Basically, push them and see how they make choices when it's not possible to get data that is 100% clear and conclusive, and they have to choose between two imperfect variations.
What to Look For: This is kind of a trick, because the answer is neither or both. The best answers start with questions that get at what the goals of your homepage are and especially how the website's customers and prospects view the two designs. Good answers will also bring upA/B testing, balancing the messaging and conversion, user testing, and customer interviews. I also like when people think you should constantly tweak and improve the homepage, rather than do a complete redesign every 9 or 18 months.