How to tell if a CEO loves marketing (without joining the company)

“Life is too short to work for a CEO who doesn’t get (love) marketing.” — Dave Gerhardt.

“But how to figure it out before you join a company?” — Rest of us.

The last post I wrote on how to think about switching jobs, was mildly well-received. A few read it, some subscribed as well. But one of the questions that kept coming back to me from the people who read it was — How to know if the founder appreciates marketing or not?

The background — I mentioned under the mental model of ‘Think like a VC’, that if your founder doesn’t appreciate marketing, you should book the first cab out of there. Though it wasn’t meant like that, it came out as an oversimplification of the model. And since the question is important, I thought to explore and share a robust model of analysis of a CEO’s love for marketing while undergoing the interview process.

What you are going to read are the mixed views of my trusted panelists (friends), including but not limited to, Siddharth Deswal, Siddharth Sharma, Shafique Gajdhar, and Chirayu Akotiya. So let’s begin.

Type 1: Apostle, Agnostic, or Athiest?

In simpler terms, you need to categorize the CEO by his level of belief (or the lack thereof) in marketing.

Apostles: The Apostle is someone who truly believes in the power of marketing. He thinks that marketing is what really differentiates the great from the good. You’d think that this is the best kind of a CEO, but the flip-side of believing in something so deeply is — you start to believe in the folklore as well. They start to believe in — marketing is the solution to every problem they have. And if only they can fix it, nothing in the world can stop them.

To figure out the Apostles, look for phrases like — ‘everything is set, once marketing kicks in, we will 10x our growth this year, ‘ if only we can tell our story right, we will be able to change the game completely, ‘sales is set up and ready, if marketing can just bring in the leads, we will be good’ and more on these lines. Basically, anything that makes them believe that “marketing is the only thing they’re missing” is an issue. Because it mostly isn’t.

Agnostics: The agnostics don’t know what marketing can bring to the table but they’re ready to find out. They have figured out that the stage that they’re in, they need to have a marketer in-house. The process of figuring it out might be through a VC recommending it, or just by a self-learning process. You need to look for phrases such as — “we are seeing early traction, but scaling is going to be crucial”, “our customers are happy about the product, I think we have great potential case studies”, “our website doesn’t tell our story right, it needs work” and so on.

Atheists: They’re pretty easy to spot. They are the ones who believe — a good product doesn’t need marketing. However, at times they can be very good at veiling it. You can peek beyond that veil through the coming models.

Type 2: Commitment Issues

Marketing is a long game. No one in this world has been able to crack or hack marketing in a month, especially not those who are blogging about ‘hacking marketing’.

CEOs with commitment issues, when it comes to marketing, feel that marketing can be hacked together. That means a couple of freelance writers, a moonlighting designer, one day a week developer, and an in-house resource can be put together and tested out to see even if they need to invest in marketing for the long term.

How to figure out the commitment issues, here are the questions you need to ask:

• Do you think marketing should get dedicated resources for development, design, and content?
• Should we build the team in-house or get agencies for everything?
• What, in your view, should be an ideal org structure for marketing?
• How do you think marketing would evolve with the company growing bigger?

Type 3: Marketing is Leads. Leads is Marketing.

It is marketing’s job to get in leads. Let’s agree on that. But let’s also agree that it’s not the only job of marketing.

Good. Since we have now agreed, all we need to find is a CEO that agrees to it.

The question to ask to gauge this is:

• How do you expect marketing to really contribute?
• When do you think is the right time to invest in the brand?
• What’s the sales cycle like and at what stages can marketing add value?

The answer should include everything ToFu, product marketing, customer marketing, sales enablement, and more.

Bonus points, if one admits that all this is needed but s/he doesn’t know much about this and asks your opinion rather.

The Un-modelable aspect

As much order I want to this chaotic aspect of analyzing the love and respect of a CEO for marketing, there will always be a part of it that is plain, simple intuitive.

You need to make the CEO talk about her views on hiring, team building, and the culture in general and pick up unsaid cues.

I personally ask this question to gain deeper insight — Imagine a year from now, I have failed in the role, what have I done wrong?

The answer will give you an understanding of the real expectations from you, and while the discussion could have covered 100 different things. This answer will be discussed in your One-on-Ones.

That’s it for now.

Please keep in mind that I am literally ‘figuring it out’ and hence this post and all others are my singular point of view with a very niche experience, hence will be wrong in more perspectives than you and I expect. Also, if you think this can be made better, you can always reach me at rohitkmsrivastav@gmail.com

Any other topics you would want me to explore? I would love to get more experts in SaaS to share their wisdom through this newsletter. Subscribe at rohitsrivastav.substack.com