Premature scaling is one of the biggest reasons startup businesses fail. If you’re growing fast, how can you keep your marketing team from falling into some of the premature scaling traps? Here are three things to watch for.
4 MIN READ
It’s possible to get too big too fast.
Same thing goes for marketing teams. Businesses (and marketing teams) fail for lots of reasons, but here are my top three risks startups face when scaling marketing.
Risk #1: myopia
I recently heard former LinkedIn VP and Google advisor Fred Kofman speak about team dynamics in an interview he did with Srini Rao on The Unmistakable Creative podcast.
Fred tells a story about interviewing soccer players and questioning them about their objectives.
He says goalkeepers will tell you that their objective is to prevent the other team from scoring—whatever happens, keep that ball out of the net.
The offensive players will explain their role as almost the exact opposite. They’re focused on scoring, on getting the ball in the goal.
Initially, it seems like these players are focused on diametrically opposed objectives. Their task, their position on the field, their skills and strengths are all very different.
But in actuality they have the exact same goal. Both offense and defense are playing to win the game.
Kofman’s description of soccer teams applies to marketing teams (or other departments) in a growing company. Departments sometimes view themselves as separate entities instead of as specialties on the same team. They see departmental goals as a competition between departments for resources and accolades.
In fact, it’s even common to talk about departments as teams or as made up of teams. But success is really only achieved by the company as a whole.
This macro-phenomenon also applies to individuals within a department. Individuals may see their function as a competition with others, rather than a holistic vision of winning together.
(There’s probably an individualist versus collectivist root to all of this, but that’s for another post.)
Risk #2: scaling without considering team specialization as a factor of scale
Companies are like economies. As they grow, they experience an increasing specialization of labor.
Companies are like economies. As they grow, they experience an increasing specialization of labor… which can kill them. Click To TweetMarketing teams function the same way.
Specialization is efficient.
For example, Aaron Ross in Predictable Revenue divides the sales function into a minimum of three specializations: sales reps, sales development reps, and customer success reps. He goes further and specializes SDRs into inbound and outbound teams. He reported that at Salesforce.com this division of SDRs alone was responsible for a 30% gain in efficiency.
Often when a company is founded, marketing is just one of the many hats worn by the CEO.
Then comes the agony of that first hire, who is expected to be a generalist. They either write all the copy, do all the design work, build out the nascent marketing tech stack, etc., or they manage contractors to do it.
It’s this evolution within the marketing function that has led full-stack marketers to give way to T-shaped marketers.
But someone who can write and manage a team isn’t going to be as good at writing as someone who writes all the time. As soon as humanly possible, leaders aim to hire specialists who can focus and execute specific functions.
Marketing sets a trend where growth is a constant transition between generalist to specialist team members. This is followed by the company as a whole.
As a marketing leader, your job is to unite these disparate souls under the vision that we win as a team.
The more specialized these new employees are, the less comfortable they are crossing over into other territories.
I’ve hired many designers and writers who specifically ask me, with fear in their voices, if they will be expected to do work outside their specialty.
The key here is to recognize that specialization creates unspoken separation. As a marketing leader, your job is to unite these disparate souls under the vision that we win as a team.
If you don’t the natural lines of demarcation can undermine your culture, erode your efficiency, thwart employee engagement, and ultimately leave you with a team that is not all rowing in the same direction.
In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.
—Robert A. Heinlein
Risk #3: failing to constantly reevaluate as you scale
The only constant is change.
Whether your marketing team is still small and you need to inoculate it from competing against other departments, or you have multiple distributed teams that need to be coached to pull together, you need to continuously reevaluate the status of your alignment behind company wins.
Take a Kaizen approach to alignment across individuals, teams, departments, and the company at large.
If your company’s overarching goals are unclear, use your influence as a marketer to articulate some, test them across departments, and when you have buy-in preach them. Marketing has undue influence in communicating company vision throughout the organization.
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P.S. Courses by Fred Kofman around his theme of Conscious Business are available on LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com).
@cmo_zen is a blog of micro meditations for marketing leaders, designed to help them find clarity and peace in the marketing maelstrom.