A Founders Formula for Building a Powerhouse Marketing Team: Who to Hire and When

In my role at Intention.ly, I’ve had the opportunity to help a number of firms build or optimize their in-house marketing teams, many of whom were also orchestrating outsourced work across multiple agencies. And I’ve learned there’s a distinct formula for success when it comes to the timing of who to hire in house and what to outsource. 

The order of hiring, while contingent on budget and resources, has to be prescriptive and directly correlated to the level of sophistication your firm is ready to handle in-house versus leaning on the expertise of an outsourced agency to guide your marketing efforts.

See below for a rough sketch to work from.

Phase One

Ideally, you’ll work with an agency that can expertly handle all of the above. In this stage, marketing strategy could also be managed in house by a marketing-minded business leader, likely the founder.

Perhaps the most important thing you’ll do in this phase is establish the metrics that will guide your ongoing efforts. These KPIs need to be communicated effectively across your in-house and agency teams so everyone can work in sync toward the same goals.

Phase Two

By this stage, you can begin putting together and publishing assets in house, starting with a content specialist and adding a designer when you’re ready. Your agency can guide your strategy, optimize your digital efforts, and, in this phase, establish a solid foundation for your marketing operations to keep your lists and processes organized.

Phase Three

Your VP of marketing should be a master manager of people and agencies, coordinating collaboration and campaign execution. He or she should be able to provide light strategy guidance, but at this stage, you’ll still need an agency for overall strategy, digital marketing, and extra support where necessary. 

In this phase, I also recommend bringing marketing operations in house. As your marketing efforts ramp up and lead generation accelerates, keeping your workflows streamlined, your lists clean and organized, and your marketing-to-sales handoff process seamless becomes even more critical. If I could do just one thing differently as I was building an internal team, it would be to hire marketing ops sooner!

Phase Four

It’s time to bring strategy in house under the leadership of a CMO — and strategy is the key here, as a lot of organizations will hire CMOs who are more adept people managers than true strategic visionaries. You’re looking for a complementary partnership between a CMO who can manage up, earning a seat at the leadership table, and a VP of Marketing who can manage down, keeping the day-to-day tactics in motion and optimized.

In this stage, the marketing generalist is either phased out or steps into a more specialized role on the team.

Phase Five

At this stage, your marketing engine is humming; if events are part of your firm’s overall growth strategy, you’ll want to add an events specialist to optimize your presence and maximize that fairly expensive investment. 

You’ll notice we still recommend outsourcing digital marketing, even for the most sophisticated and mature marketing organizations. Here’s why: by this phase, a good digital marketing agency will know the nuances of your business, your target audience, and your competitors’ campaigns inside and out. That means they can effortlessly fine-tune campaigns and critical metrics like cost per lead and client acquisition cost to help you make the most of your budget. Most agencies also have greater visibility into the competitive landscape than your in-house team does, giving you an extra advantage.

At this point, you might also want to consider retaining an agency for specialized support conceptualizing and executing innovative strategies outside of your typical campaigns. Think of this as a consulting partnership to amplify your already high-performing marketing efforts.

Finally, I don’t think there’s a single phase in your growth journey wherein you wouldn’t benefit from extra support. As you hire, build your team, and continue evolving your business, you’re going to need extra hands to fill gaps and keep your engine running smoothly. This is where an agency that’s built to scale up and down with your firm becomes an invaluable extension of your team.