Who was your first Marketing hire, and what was on their business card?
Now the harder question.
Did that title match what you actually needed them to do in their first six months?
For most SaaS companies the honest answer is no. The title said Head of Marketing. The job was building pipeline from nothing, on their own, whilst the sales team asked every Monday where the leads were.
That gap between the title and the work is where most SaaS Marketing hiring falls over.
Not at interview. Not at offer. At the point somebody decided what the role was.
Let's Dive In!
Why Sequencing matters more than Seniority
Sales hiring has a fairly well understood order. You hire AEs, you add SDRs when there is enough inbound and outbound to split, you hire a Leader when there are enough people to need managing.
Marketing does not get the same treatment. It tends to get hired as one lump called "Marketing", usually late, usually after somebody notices the pipeline is thin.
The result is a role that has to be everything at once. Brand and demand and content and product marketing and events and the website. No one person does all of that well, and the people who claim they can are generally the ones you should worry about.
Sequencing fixes this. Not by hiring more people, but by being clear about which single part of marketing is actually the constraint right now.
Stage One: One Person who does the work
Before there is repeatable pipeline, you need one senior individual contributor who can generate demand and is genuinely happy doing it themselves.
Hands on keyboard. Writing the emails, running the campaigns, fixing the landing pages, sitting close enough to sales to hear the objections first hand.
This is the hire that gets mistitled most often. Calling it Head of Marketing feels generous, and it helps at offer stage. It also creates two problems. You attract people who want to build a team rather than build pipeline. And when you do hire an actual Leader eighteen months later, you have a title collision and a difficult conversation.
What good looks like at this stage is someone who can point at pipeline they created and tell you how. Not someone with a lovely deck about brand architecture.
Stage Two: Split Demand and Product Marketing
The signal for this one is usually sitting in your sales pipeline already.
When deals start going quiet late in the cycle, and your AEs describe the losses as pricing, it is worth checking whether it is really positioning. Buyers rarely say "your story was weaker than theirs". They say the budget moved.
That is the point Product Marketing stops being a nice-to-have. Positioning, competitive, the messaging your sellers use in the room, the enablement that makes a new AE dangerous in month three rather than month seven.
Splitting Demand and Product Marketing also gives your first Marketer a decision to make. Some want the demand half, some want the product half. Asking them is more useful than assuming, and it tells you a lot about what you have.
Stage Three: Hire the Leader
Hire Marketing Leadership when there is a function to lead.
If Marketing is one or two people and the constraint is execution rather than direction, a VP or CMO will spend their first year doing a job they did not sign up for. They will do it, because good people do. Then they will leave, and you will have lost a year and a salary.
The better signal is when the Channels work, the specialists are in place, and the real bottleneck has become trade-offs. Where does the next pound go. Which segment do we stop serving. What are we not doing next quarter. Those are leadership problems, and they only appear once the basics are running.
The Two Questions to settle before you open any Marketing search
This matters more than the sequence, honestly.
What is Marketing accountable for? Pipeline, sourced revenue, or something softer like awareness and brand. There is no wrong answer, but there is a wrong process, which is not deciding and then arguing about it at the first quarterly review. Candidates will ask this in the second conversation. If you and your Revenue Leader give different answers, the strong ones walk.
Who does the Hire report to? If Marketing reports into Sales, say so early. Plenty of excellent Marketers are completely fine with it, especially at the demand end. The ones who are not will tell you in the first call, which saves everyone a month of process.
Most stalled marketing searches I see are not a supply problem. The market is not empty. The remit was just never agreed, so every shortlist satisfies one Stakeholder and fails another, and the Agency gets blamed for the calibration nobody did.
Back to the Business Card
If you are about to open a Marketing role, try writing the first six months of the job before you write the title.
What does this person do in week one. What do they own by month three. What would make you say, at the end of the year, that this was the right hire.
Then pick the title that fits it. Not the other way round.
We wrote more about how this works across Demand Generation, Product Marketing and Marketing Leadership on our SaaS marketing recruitment page, including the bits that tend to go wrong at each stage.
And if you are staring at a brief right now and cannot decide whether the role is a doer or a Leader, that is a short conversation and usually a useful one.
Book a call and we will talk it through.
Josh Bunce
Global Business Development Manager
