The Very First Thing New Marketing Hires Should Do
April 28, 2014
What’s the very best way to introduce new marketing hires to your product and customers? HubSpot Product Marketing Director Rick Burnes shares his team’s secret.
By now, maybe your startup’s small marketing team has developed a unified grasp on your company’s story. You’ve invested time into crafting a compelling narrative, built a brand around the organization’s “face,” and developed a content strategy that consistently delivers relevant messaging to prospective buyers.
That’s great. But now it’s time to bring on a few new marketing hires to help those efforts scale.
While that increased headcount might be good for productivity, those additions are likely to present some challenges, as well. Namely, making sure the new marketing hires truly understand the product and your customers, and can tell the right stories. As every seasoned marketing leader knows, that’s a process that can be an incredibly time-consuming not to mention fraught with trial and error.
Of course, that’s true of any new hire. So, why is it a problem for marketing teams in particular? As HubSpot’s Product Marketing Director Rick Burnes told OpenView in a recent podcast, it has everything to do with relevancy and consistency.
“If you’re a company trying to tell a story that really resonates, you want that story to be consistent,” Burnes says. “You’ve got to make sure that what you do and what you spend all your time on is useful. That’s hard to do, particularly when you’re trying to get new team members up to speed.”
“One of the biggest risks a marketing team runs is doing a ton of work and having none of it used by the sales team. You’re just irrelevant then, and you’re not having an impact on the business.”
— Rick Burnes, Director of Product Marketing at HubSpot
The Solution: Make New Marketing Hires Write a Case Study Before They Do Anything Else
So, what does Burnes do to accelerate the process of ramping up fresh marketing talent and ensuring they fully grasp HubSpot’s value to its customers? He has new hires compose a case study about an individual customer’s experience using HubSpot’s products.
“I think that’s really, really important for marketers, because that role isn’t necessarily a customer-facing one,” Burnes says. “In a services or sales role, you’re going to talk to customers pretty regularly. But in a marketing role, you may never talk to an actual customer and that can make it difficult to acquire the perspective you really need to do your job well.”
Burnes says this engagement model also encourages marketers to more proactively venture outside of traditional marketing silos.
“Asking salespeople for their input and feedback on how to tell a customer’s story might seem like a simple thing, but it can have a huge impact,” Burnes explains. “It facilitates the information flow, which then improves the story. It makes the story more consistent and relevant.”
The Bottom Line Impact of Better Marketing Content
Listen to the Full Interview
Ultimately, Burnes says there are numerous benefits to having new marketing team members take this small step before fully immersing themselves in their day-to-day responsibilities — from shorter training and onboarding cycles, to improved content creation and product messaging.
But Burnes says all of those benefits collectively contribute to a bigger reward — better informed and prepared prospects, and a much happier sales force.
“I think one of the things we’ve seen is that our prospects come much better prepared to sales calls,” Burnes says. “As a result, the sales conversation is much more focused on strategy and solving problems, as opposed to just a show-and-tell of features. That makes it a much more productive conversation that is more useful for the prospect.”
Do you agree with Rick? In addition to writing case studies, are there any other activities that can help bring new marketing hires up to speed?
Image by Pink Sherbet Photography
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