Building B2B Startup Marketing Orgs from 1 to 25+
Featuring marketing org chart diagrams
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I published my first guide to B2B startup marketing org charts as the first MKT1 Newsletter, way back on 12/1/20. Every company organized their marketing teams differently and I found myself explaining my POV over and over again. Nearly 4 years later, I’m still explaining it, but slightly differently—and I think a fresh post is needed on how to build a marketing team.
Marketing has changed (dramatically) over those years, from startups switching from a growth at all costs to an efficient growth mindset due to macro-trends to the rise of AI and no-code automation. That said, many of my core principles for building and organizing marketing teams are the same–I still recommend organizing around 3 main sub-functions (brand & content, product marketing, and growth marketing).
This post will dive into what I believe is the ideal marketing org chart set up today for various team sizes, and things to watch out for as you build and organize your marketing team.
This newsletter is the first of 3 on marketing org charts & roles
Newsletter 1: Org design at various team sizes
Marketing org design strategy
How org charts change as you scale from 1-25+
Nuances and details for each sub-function
Newsletter 2: How roles and org charts vary across marketing teams, with expert input from Marketing Leaders with experience at Mercury, Front, Lattice, Apollo, Cocoon, Anrok, Atlassian, and more - for paid subscribers only.
Newsletter 3: Data showing the evolution of marketing roles
Recommended products & agencies
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Part 1: Marketing org design strategy
Before you start hiring more marketers or (re)organizing your marketing team, make sure you understand a few basics of B2B startup marketing org design.
No two marketing org charts are exactly the same
Think of marketing hiring as a puzzle—unlike sales, there are over 20 unique roles, and no two marketers have the same skillset.
You need to customize your org structure based on your existing team, business model, audience, and market. To determine who you need to hire, understand your primary growth engine (inbound, outbound, ecosystem, events) and content strategy and formats (video, events, written guides, etc). Hire generalists first, and as you scale you can bring in specialists.
Remember while org design matters, the top priority is hiring people who are both strategic thinkers and effective executers. Scale the team by filling in gaps around these people.
Marketing teams are not sales teams…they’re actually more like product teams
Many founders, execs and even marketers themselves, view marketing as an extension of the sales team and think marketing should be focused on driving the pipeline this quarter. Marketing should have a much broader scope, otherwise, you’ll limit marketing’s impact on your business.
Yes, marketing should focus on top-of-funnel activities, but it also needs to drive full-funnel conversion, enhance the customer experience, and build a brand that fuels long-term growth.
In reality, marketing is more like a product team. Both are multidisciplinary and must balance short-term tasks with long-term, high-impact projects. Like product teams, marketing needs deep audience and market insights and a mix of multi-disciplinary roles—producers/product managers, infrastructure, designers, analysts, developers, and more.
For more on why marketing is less like sales and more like product, check out this newsletter on marketing and sales and this newsletter on marketing and product.
Balancing fuel & engine, across 3 marketing sub-functions
Your team must create value-add fuel and craft a well-running engine for your specific audience, in your specific market. Your fuel needs to be custom-made for your engine and your engine needs to be custom-made for your fuel.
This analogy is the simplest way I’ve found to throw away the marketing jargon, ever-changing marketing job titles, and complicated frameworks and explain the mix of things you need to create an efficient and effective marketing function. I wrote about my fuel and engine framework in this newsletter.
To balance fuel and engine successfully, you also need a “foundation.” This foundation—based on your specific product, audience, and market—drives both fuel and engine strategy.
Keeping in mind the fuel & engine analogy, marketing teams are typically organized into 3 sub-functions:
Content & Brand aka the Fuel: Responsible for creating fuel (words, design, video, etc) that aligns with your audience and engine.
Growth Marketing aka the Engine: Responsible for driving full-funnel growth and revenue, and distributing “fuel” across multiple channels–and setting up the tooling, tests, and optimizations needed.
Product Marketing aka the Foundation: Responsible for doing the research needed to understand your audience, market, product, and positioning, which informs all marketing activities. It also helps with fuel & engine activities that require deep product and audience knowledge, like product launches, sales and partnership enablement, and messaging for campaigns.
Organize marketing like product: The need for “producers”
You need a multi-disciplinary marketing team that not only covers fuel and engine activities but also builds the foundation needed to create the right fuel and engine. This results in a team that typically has the 3 sub-functions mentioned above.
But, what tends to happen is each sub-function works in silos–leading to fuel, engine, and audience misalignment.
Some examples: The fuel doesn’t always get distributed effectively (if at all) through your engine. The engine is built for the wrong GTM motion (i.e. all outbound for a self-serve sales motion). Product marketing research, including segmentation and positioning, aren’t considered when creating content (“fuel”), or targeting is done wrong when running paid campaigns (“engine”).
Teams may try to solve for these silos by:
Adding a demand gen or campaign manager to the growth marketing (“engine”) team
Adding a role on the content & brand (“fuel”) team to think through content distribution
Requiring product marketing to connect the dots and across fuel & engine activities
Crossing their fingers and hoping the teams start combining fuel & engine more effectively
I think there’s a better way and I have a new recommendation for how to get fuel & engine aligned: You need what I’m calling “producers”, who serve as dot connectors or glue on your team. They unite fuel & engine activities, run campaigns, serve as project managers for the content creation process, oversee programs and events, and provide feedback back to individual teams on what’s working and what’s not, etc.
IMO, these “producers”, should report directly to the head of marketing, not into one of the leaders of the 3 sub-functions, and work across all areas of marketing. This will add leverage to the entire team, even when your team is just 5 people.
Part 2: Marketing org charts by team size
Here are my recommended org charts for B2B startup marketing teams at 3 sizes. These org charts are meant to be rough guides—the exact roles on your team may vary.
1 to 10 person marketing teams
When building a team from 1 to 10 marketers, make sure to avoid these common mistakes:
Hiring only on the engine side. I see teams have multiple growth marketers or demand gen contributors and don’t have anyone to create content to feed the engine they are building—this doesn’t work! And a reminder, that marketing shouldn’t be organized like a sales team with a bunch of people in the exact same pipeline generating role.
Hiring a very senior Head of Marketing too soon. The Head of Marketing will need to contribute as an individual contributor until your marketing team is well over 20 people. When a Head of Marketing only has big company experience before joining a much smaller startup, they often can’t get the balance of strategy and execution right.
Bringing on way too many contractors, with no one to manage them internally. It’s hard to make external marketers successful without someone setting overall strategy internally with deep knowledge of the business. I wrote about when and how to hire contractors and agencies in this newsletter.
Hiring just specialists, with no coverage across marketing. You need to hire generalists early on, who can at least help out with most areas of marketing.
10-20 person marketing teams
When scaling from 10-20 marketers, organizing your team gets a bit more complex, watch out for these common mistakes:
Unbalanced fuel & engine teams: One team may start to get bigger than others. I recommend making hiring plans that alternate between fuel & engine hires, making sure you have enough “producers” and product marketers to support their efforts.
Not adding process where needed: At this scale, you’ll need a defined process for reviewing and editing work, running campaigns, setting goals and tracking them, reporting on metrics, etc.
Too many direct reports for Head of Marketing: If the Head of Marketing doesn’t put leaders in place for each sub-function (who can scale) around a total team size of 15, things can get out of hand quickly.
Unclear responsibilities with gaps and overlaps: You will likely need to update your hiring plans after bringing each new person onto the team—and based on changes to your strategy and in your market. Constantly assess gaps and overlaps on your team and don’t be afraid to make changes to your plan.
For example, if a competitor is beginning to take market share, you may need to bring on a product marketer to focus on competitive and/or positioning. Or If you hire a marketing ops leader, who also knows lifecycle marketing well, a dedicated lifecycle marketer may become a lower priority over other roles in your hiring plan.
20+ person marketing teams
When your marketing team scales past 20, you need to shift how you organize and run your team, here are mistakes to avoid:
Process and hand off breakdowns: Once you hit 20 people you need to develop even more processes. Everyone won’t know what everyone else is working on, or even what everyone’s role is. The “producer” roles become even more critical.
Being reluctant to re-org marketing: At this point, it may make sense to have more than 3 marketing sub-functions, create centralized cross-functional teams (design, ops, partnerships), or move areas like events, ecosystem, and lifecycle to other sub-functions. Don’t be afraid to do this if it will help you scale from 20-50 marketers!
Cross-functional relationships become strained: When it’s harder to figure out who is doing what on marketing and dotted line relationships get blurred, it can cause challenges working across teams. Make sure all managers and leads on your team are focused on making these relationships positive. More in my newsletter on internal marketing.
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✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all hiring and org chart templates here and copy the FigJam to create your own org chart.
👁️ Related newsletters: How org charts vary across teams and Data showing the evolution of marketing roles
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📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which includes how roles and sub-functions evolve as your team scales.