10 Guidelines for Building a Marketing Org (Exit Five Newsletter #117)
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Hello and welcome to the Exit Five Weekly Newsletter - read by 20,000 B2B marketing professionals around the world. Exit Five is a membership site designed to help you build a successful career in B2B marketing. Join 4,000 other members at exitfive.com.
🗓️ What Your 2025 Marketing Plan is Missing
The first time I made a marketing plan – I was so excited. I was absolutely sure I nailed it…
… until the end of the quarter when I had to compare it to what I’d actually been able to execute on.
Planning is where marketing leaders (first time and veterans alike) usually struggle most – it turns out there’s a huge gap between building a marketing strategy and making sure the work actually gets done.
Don’t be like me and end up with a plan you and your team don’t follow – make sure it’s not missing that link between strategy and execution.
Want to learn how?
Our friends at Planful created a free step-by-step resource to guide you through building, executing on, and improving your plan for 2025.
Get your hands on it here if you want to build a smarter marketing plan for 2025.
🛠️10 Guidelines for Building (or Rebuilding) a Marketing Org
At some point in your marketing career (especially if you want to be a CMO) – you’re going to have to build out a marketing organization.
Or just as likely, rebuild one.
This is arguably the hardest thing a marketing leader has to do – and the best way to approach it is by learning from someone who’s done it before.
Luckily, Peter Mahoney (CMO, GoTo) has done this a few times now… and he’s shared 10 guidelines he’s learned over the years with us live at Drive. Let’s dig in:
#1: Design around your marketing strategy
If your strategy is thought leadership, that has an impact on how you design the organization.
You’d need to have subject matter experts on your team, and make sure you’re set up for publishing content. On the flip side, if your strategy is PLG, you need strong Product Marketing and UX expertise.
And if the strategy shifts, your team needs to shift.
#2: Make sure the financial model supports your organization
Get up close and personal with the P&L and make sure that the cost of the organization you’re building and how much you’re spending to bring in new business supports itself.
#3: Keep it simple
Peter’s advice is simple: If you can’t draw it on a napkin, you are doing something wrong. He has a team of over 300 right now, and can draw the whole organization on a post-it.
#4: Build in clear accountability
Each department should know exactly what they’re responsible for. For example:
Product marketing owns retention.
Growth owns the booking plan.
Corporate owns brand awareness.
And so on – keep these lines clear to keep your teams focused.
#5: Resist layers
Remember playing telephone when you were little? Where one person would start with a simple sentence and pass it along, and by the end barely any of the words were the same?
Yeah, having a massive organization is just like that – except it's your goals that get mangled.
The more layers there are, the less visibility you get.
#6: Do not design around the individual
You might have someone awesome on the team already, or in your network. But if it isn’t a clear fit with what the organization needs, resist the temptation to design a role just for them.
#7: Clearly define service vs outcome centers
Some parts of the organization provide support, and others need to deliver results. Make sure this is clearly defined so that everyone knows their role and how they contribute to the organization's success.
#8: Build the smallest organization necessary
This is pretty straightforward: avoid a bloated team (and setting yourself up for layoffs in the future).
#9: Make a hiring decision as difficult as it is to lay someone off
Hire only if:
- You are confident that you will need this role in 2 – 3 years
- You are willing to ask this person to change 1/3 or more of their life
- You are fully prepared to tell this person that you are eliminating their job
#10: Define your full-time vs. part-time vs. outsource strategy
Here’s the cheat sheet Peter uses:
Make a hiring decision as difficult as it is to lay someone off. Hire only if:
- You are confident that you will need this role in 2 – 3 years
- You are willing to ask this person to change 1/3 or more of their life
- You are fully prepared to tell this person that you are eliminating their job
P.S. Of course, this is just a quick recap of Peter’s wisdom, so let me know if you’d like to see the slide deck and I’ll send it over.
And if you’ve built a marketing organization before – I’d love to hear from you. What guidelines would you add to this list? What lessons did you learn?
Just reply to this email – I read (and cherish) every one :)
📺UPCOMING EVENTS
“What’s working to drive pipeline?” is probably the toughest question you have to answer as a B2B Marketer.
How do you briefly explain the 200 touchpoints between a discovery meeting and contract signature?
How do you tell if something was truly inbound or outbound sourced?
How do you actually do attribution in a way the rest of the company will understand?
Our next Exit Five Live session will teach you exactly how to answer those questions. We’ll be joined by expert Emir Atli from HockeyStack, who will break down how to change the narrative on what’s working so you have the freedom to run marketing the right way.
We’ll cover:
- Why the founder of an attribution company believes attribution is dead (and how we got here)
- Reporting tactics that identify causation so you can cut the things that aren’t working and do more of the good stuff
- What “Good” attribution actually looks like, with real examples you can use to model your own reporting
The Ultimate Roast of B2B Websites
ICYMI: Yesterday we announced our first ever virtual event.
It's one day all about one topic - the most important asset to any B2B marketer:
The website.
We put together a group of absolute PROS to help you improve your website (by *politely* roasting your website, of course) and we'll focus on:
- SEO
- Homepage
- Product Pages
- Landing Pages
- Pricing Pages
🎁 Plus we're giving away some serious prizes to attendees, including $5,000 in Fiverr credits, a $60,000 website redesign from NoBoringDesign and 3 months free for an SEMRush subscription (plus, we're adding a few more so stay tuned).
Register now for October 15th.
🏢 OPEN ROLES
Who's Hiring Right Now?
HOT JOB OF THE WEEK: Circle is hiring a Head of Marketing and it's what I'd define as a dream role. If you're a member of Exit Five, you already know the product – we use it to manage our community. You'd be joining a killer team and taking on the challenge of brand building as they go multi-product.
Other open roles on the Exit Five job board this week:
- CourseStorm is hiring a Growth Marketing Manager
- Freshpaint is hiring a Product Marketing Manager
- Close is hiring a Marketing Operations Manager. USA Only, 100% Remote.
- Brainlabs is hiring a Global CMO/EVP of Social.
- Culture Partners is hiring a Business Illustrator and an Instructional Designer & Map Developer
Join us in exitfive
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