Breaking into GTM

What does Emily Kramer say your first marketing hire must already be able to do?

The short answer

Emily Kramer, who led marketing at Asana and Carta and now runs MKT1, names the number one mistake as hiring someone with too many firsts. She scores candidates on six dimensions: hands on execution, owning strategy, early stage startup experience, your specific business model, people management, and expertise in your most critical function. A first marketer should already have four or five of those, leaving one or two genuinely new, because with too many firsts the learning curve is simply too steep to survive. Her preferred shape is a pi shaped marketer with two real depths, most often product plus growth. Her second model explains why so many marketing hires disappoint: marketing is fuel (the copy, content and creative) plus engine (the channels, tooling, targeting and measurement), startups almost always over index on one, and hiring for the half you already have does nothing.

Go deeper, your way

4 hand-picked resources, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

The same ground, at another level

How how great operators think reads from a different seat.

What does Gong's call data actually say top sellers do differently in discovery? Gong analysed over 519,000 B2B sales calls and found that success peaks when a rep asks roughly 11 to 14 targeted questions on a discovery call, an... Doing the work 3 resources → What does April Dunford say most teams get wrong about positioning? Dunford's core claim, after working with over 300 technology companies, is that positioning is not a tagline, not branding, and not messaging. It i... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → What did Slack's "We don't sell saddles here" memo actually change about how they sold? Stewart Butterfield sent the memo to the Tiny Speck team on 31 July 2013, two weeks before Slack's preview release, and published it later. Its arg... How the best do it 5 resources →

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People also ask

What did Slack's "We don't sell saddles here" memo actually change about how they sold? Stewart Butterfield sent the memo to the Tiny Speck team on 31 July 2013, two weeks before Slack's preview release, and published it later. Its arg... How the best do it 5 resources → What does April Dunford say most teams get wrong about positioning? Dunford's core claim, after working with over 300 technology companies, is that positioning is not a tagline, not branding, and not messaging. It i... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → What does Gong's call data actually say top sellers do differently in discovery? Gong analysed over 519,000 B2B sales calls and found that success peaks when a rep asks roughly 11 to 14 targeted questions on a discovery call, an... Doing the work 3 resources → When should you add a sales team on top of a self serve product, and how do you avoid breaking it? Elena Verna's rule is that most companies do this too soon and for the wrong reasons. The signals that sales will actually help are an average orde... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → When does a founder stop selling personally, and why do the best ones hire two reps instead of one? Jason Lemkin's marker is that the founder closes the first batch themselves, roughly the first ten customers, because if you have not done it you w... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Why do the best operators settle pricing before the product is finished? Madhavan Ramanujam's position, from Simon-Kucher and Monetizing Innovation, is that willingness to pay is a product design input, not a launch deci... How the best do it 3 resources →
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