Your AEs are missing quota and everyone in the room agrees it is a pipeline problem.
What nobody says out loud is that there is no Marketing Function to speak of - just a founder with a design tool, and an SDR team cold-calling into silence.
Strive recruits the Marketing side of the Revenue Org for B2B SaaS companies.
Demand generation, Product Marketing, Content, Growth and the Leaders who join it all up, across the UK, the US and Europe.
If you take one thing from this page: Your first Marketing hire is not a Brand person and it is not a VP. It is someone who can build pipeline this quarter and prove where it came from.
The Problem: Marketing gets hired last and blamed first
Most SaaS companies build Sales before they build Marketing. It makes sense at the time. Sellers carry a number, and a number is easy to defend to a board.
Then the Sales team doubles and the pipeline does not. Someone hires a Marketing Generalist, hands them a website refresh and a conference stand, and waits two quarters for something to happen.
When it does not, the conclusion is that marketing does not work here.
What actually went wrong is nearly always one of three things:
- The role was scoped as a Brand job when the Business needed a pipeline job.
- The hire was too senior to do the work, or too junior to decide what the work should be.
- Nobody agreed what Marketing was accountable for before the offer went out, so the first Quarterly Review became an argument about attribution.
SaaS Marketing hiring goes wrong at the scoping stage far more often than at the interview stage. That is where we spend our time.
What We Do
We recruit the Commercial Marketing roles that sit closest to revenue:
- Demand Generation - Paid, Lifecycle, Campaigns and the people who carry a pipeline target.
- Product Marketing - Positioning, Messaging, Competitive, Launch and Sales Enablement.
- Content and SEO - Including the search and AI-visibility work that increasingly decides whether buyers find you at all.
- Growth and Marketing Operations - Attribution, Funnel Instrumentation and the plumbing that makes everything else defensible.
- Marketing Leadership - Head of Marketing, VP Marketing and CMO, from first hire through to scale.
We work with Software Companies across the UK, the US and Europe, most often somewhere between Seed and Series C.
Marketing searches run alongside the rest of the Revenue Org, so the hire is calibrated against the sales team it has to feed rather than assessed in isolation.
Why the first Marketing Hire decides what Sales can do
A Sales Team can only sell into the demand that reaches it.
Get the first Marketer wrong and you do not simply lose that person's contribution - you spend two or three quarters finding out.
The knock-on effects are the expensive part.
AEs prospect into cold lists because there is nothing warm. Ramp stretches, because new starters have no proof points to lean on. The strongest sellers leave first, because they can. By the time the marketing hire is corrected, the sales problem has quietly become a retention problem.
It works in the other direction too. A Demand hire who lands well tends to show up in the sales numbers within a couple of quarters, and it changes what you can credibly hire into next.
The Playbook: Who to Hire, and in what Order
There is no universal sequence, but there is a pattern that holds for most B2B SaaS companies.
- Early, pre-repeatable pipeline: one Senior Individual Contributor who can generate Demand and is content doing the work themselves. Hands on keyboard, no team to manage. This person is often mislabelled as a Head of Marketing, which causes trouble at the next hire.
- Once Sales is a team rather than a Founder: Split Demand Generation and Product Marketing. The clearest signal that Product Marketing is overdue is sales losing deals on positioning rather than on price.
- Once Marketing is a Function: Hire the Leader who can own a number, with specialists underneath. Hire Leadership when there is something to lead, not before.
Two things worth settling before you open a search: What Marketing is accountable for - Pipeline, Sourced Revenue, or something softer - and who the hire reports to. If Marketing reports into Sales, say so in the first conversation. Plenty of strong candidates are fine with it, and the ones who are not will tell you early, which saves everybody a month.
How this Plays out in Practice
A Series A data platform in the UK, first Marketing hire. The brief opened as a Head of Marketing. Two conversations in it was clear the business needed someone who would build pipeline personally for at least a year. We rescoped it as a Senior Demand Generation role, and they hired someone who would never have applied to the original advert.
A US SaaS business, Product Marketing. Sales were losing competitive deals late in the cycle and reading it as a pricing problem. What they actually needed was someone to rebuild the competitive story and the enablement around it. The Hiring Manager was a Revenue Leader rather than a CMO, so the scorecard was written in sales language from the start.
A European Scale-up, VP Marketing. The search had been open for months with no offers made. The bar was not the problem. The remit had never been agreed between the CEO and the Revenue Leader, so every shortlist satisfied one of them and failed the other. We ran a calibration session before sourcing restarted.
Details are anonymised. Happy to talk through comparable searches on a call.
Why Strive
We are a Go-To-Market Recruitment Business, not a generalist Agency with a Marketing desk bolted on.
The same team recruits the AEs, the Customer Success Org and the Revenue Leadership, so we see how a Marketing hire lands rather than just whether they accept.
What that changes in practice:
- We will push back on the brief. If the scope and the stage do not match, you will hear it before we start sourcing.
- We map the market properly rather than working a database. Most of the strongest SaaS Marketers are not looking.
- We are straight about what we do not do. We recruit Commercial teams. If you need Engineers, Product Managers or Data Scientists, we will say so and point you elsewhere.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Agency for SaaS Marketing Roles?
The right Agency for a SaaS Marketing hire is one that understands the Revenue Org the role has to feed, not just the Marketing function in isolation. Strive recruits Demand Generation, Product Marketing, Content, Growth and Marketing Leadership for B2B software companies across the UK, US and Europe, alongside the Sales and Customer Success teams those hires support. If an Agency cannot tell you how the Marketing hire changes what your AEs can do, they are recruiting a job title rather than an outcome.
What should a SaaS Company's first Marketing hire be?
Almost always a senior Individual Contributor who can generate demand and is happy doing the work themselves. Not a brand hire, and not a VP. The first Marketer needs to build pipeline personally, prove where it came from, and set the template you calibrate later hires against. Companies that hire a Leader first usually end up paying for strategy they do not yet have the team to execute.
When should we hire a VP Marketing or CMO?
Once there is a Function to lead. If Marketing is one or two people and the main constraint is execution rather than direction, a Senior Leader will spend their first year doing a job they were not hired for, and will leave. The clearer signal is when specialists are in place, the channels work, and the bottleneck has become sequencing and trade-offs across them.
Do you recruit Product Marketing as well as Demand Generation?
Yes. Product Marketing tends to become urgent when sales start losing competitive deals late in the cycle and reading it as a pricing problem. We recruit positioning, messaging, competitive and enablement roles, and we will often push for Product Marketing earlier than the original brief suggests when the deal-loss pattern points that way.
How long does a SaaS Marketing search take?
The variable is rarely candidate supply. It is how quickly the business agrees what marketing is accountable for and who the hire reports to. Searches where the scorecard is settled up front move quickly. Searches where the CEO and the revenue leader have different definitions of the role stall at shortlist stage, however good the candidates are. We try to resolve that on paper before sourcing starts.
Do you recruit Marketing roles outside the UK?
Yes. We run searches across the UK, the US and Europe, and a large share of our work is helping software companies hire their first marketer in a new market. We recruit commercial teams only. If you need engineering, product or data hires, we will tell you and point you somewhere better placed.