Why most marketing teams are mediocre
4 things that are going wrong and what can be done about it
Here's the harsh truth that nobody is saying (but hard to ignore if you work with enough growth-stage companies as an agency):
Most growth-stage marketing teams are pretty mediocre.
I think Europe is probably worse than the US (because Europe is more egalitarian, while the American system rewards competency more), but it seems true across the board.
Of course there are exceptions.
Plenty of them.
But most of them grow fast despite their marketing team.
What is going wrong?
And what can be done about it?
Let's jump in…
1.) CMOs as marketing managers
Most startups want to hire a CMO who has done something impressive before. Makes sense. But what they mostly end up doing, is hiring people that were in charge of marketing at an impressive company.
That's not the same thing.
Most of these people are (very competent) managers, who just so happened to be managing a marketing org. But they are not steeped in marketing through-and-through. They came in as a captain, but have never done the marketing grunt work at an operational level.
That leads to two problems: the CMO doesn't know what A+ execution looks like, and — an even bigger problem…
2.) The CMO has no strategy
Most CMOs manage by looking at what others do. They look at what faster-growing and more well-known companies around them are doing… and they do the same.
They want a better website. They want to invest in content marketing. They want the product-led growth that people on LinkedIn talked about. They want expensive video ads.
But that's not a strategy. That's not a holistic, systematic, first-principles-based sense of how the company will grow and become 10x bigger than it is right now.
And if the CMO has no plan, nobody else will either (because even if they have an idea, they need CMO-level authority over resources to get it done).
3.) Marketing needs permission for everything
Marketing orgs get hamstrung when they need permissions from outside the sphere that the CMO can control:
They need dev resources from product, to update their website
They can't get better onboarding prioritised on the roadmap
Their ads & creatives need to run through compliance
The founder gets involved over the choice of brand colour or other random things
Etcetera. Even if the marketing leader is excellent, he won't be able to get anything done.
4.) Offering a mediocre deal to mediocre players
Marketing leaders generally underestimate how much leverage smarter people have. Someone who is 10 IQ points smarter is not only going to be better, but will i) be quicker to spot hidden patterns, ii) craft better strategy based on that data, iii) pick up skills (much) faster, and iv) execute on that strategy better.
Better yet, smarter people will insist on hiring other smart people—who are probably their friends. Smarter people are a tremendous leverage, but most CMOs can neither spot them nor attract them.
What we end up with is an organisation that is well-managed but without a strategy, well-intended but toothless to act, and well-staffed but with mediocre players.
In other words:
Textbook mediocre.
Is there hope?
Yes.
Always.
An agency like Double can help you get the smart people on board immediately, while we help you work out a plan on how to attract better people and fix other organisational issues (like… ahum… the fact that you don't have a strategy, either!)
And more investments in branding can help you attract better players.
… which is something I plan to talk about in the next email!
Best,
—Pieter
Amen.