Picking the right VP Marketing

This is a tough one and probably the one thing I can say with authority is, as an engineer I've always found it really hard to find a really good VP marketing. I’ve learned to be really tough on this position, like VP Sales, because it's so hard to see the results of a bad one until its too late. I also grew up in a place where marketing was confused with marcom, and sales & marketing were confused as the same thing. My other confusion on venture backed companies is why they so often look like science projects with bloated engineering teams but really thin marketing (and sales). The defense for this is that the product hasn’t been invented yet so what’s the use of (sales and) marketing? Obviously marketing is more valuable before the product is invented, and ideally before the company has been funded.

All of us who grew up in the laser business are painfully familiar with the solution looking for a problem syndrome ... a great marketing person is deep enough in the space to have a vision for where the market is going, what it needs, and can therefore determine what product to create, and when it will be needed. Also what groups will want to buy it, and what value it will be to them in order to create a model for sales. This understanding is key to success--often the CEO has this vision already, so can get away with a weaker VP marketing, which is why this position is often filled with a great marcom person with little or no strategic vision.

The other critical element is the ability to point sales, to target the right verticals and user groups within those verticals, and to create the leads that sales can go try to close. The Internet has created many new tools to accomplish these goals and most capable marketing people should do well in this area. A finer filter is the quality of lead generation, and targeting--which again requires a pretty clear vision of the market. The next piece is analytic--how well can the marketing VP analyze the data coming back from the market, sales, engineering, etc ... and course correct accordingly?

The most arduous issue is that even a mediocre marketing person is great at marketing themselves, so it's really hard to tell how good they really are. Reference checks are absolutely critical here, and especially back channel i.e., not the references listed in the resume but ideally the boss they reported to and people around them in the companies they worked at.

Unfortunately it's not an area where you can afford to hire someone who does not have domain experience; you can’t afford to have them learn on the job--they have to already have a vision of your market. I have had a couple of cases where I was able to take a promising engineer, or sales person and combine them with an experienced marketing person to create a great marketing team, and put the inexperienced person on the right marketing track for their career, but it's rare.

Being an engineer I have a personal bias towards marketing people who have come from the technical track, but really, a well trained marketing graduate, with some business seasoning is pretty hard to beat.

One of my friends, Tony Surtees who ran a division of Yahoo, is one of the best consumer marketing people I know and caused some controversy when he first graduated by marketing himself a little too effectively and taking out a full page ad in a major newspaper--apparently no one from that prestigious marketing school had ever done something like that before; it's somewhat ironic that Tony quickly got out of print and into digital media ;-) Tony dazzles tech startups with his creative guerilla marketing plays. And this is another pet peeve of mine; marketing needs to spend money, often more than anyone else in the organization, but really good marketing people can do a lot with a little, and in the early stages of a startup it's better to build up a mystique and stay in stealth longer than to try to make a splash by brute force. It's more credible to be viral, less expensive, and keeps you out of the gun sights of large competitors.

However, as a lesson from the Telco era, and laser startups--you should never be in stealth from customers! Many, many, were ... ;-(