Hiring A CMO
Tips on finding a marketing leader who will drive growth
Hiring a Chief Marketing Officer is one of the hardest tasks technical founders face. Candidates present well, and the role spans such a broad range of skills that it can be difficult to know who to choose. You can easily fall into the trap of hiring a slick, big-company executive who wants to invest in building your brand. They’ll bring in creative agencies, hire a lot of people, spend a ton of money, and the messaging will be so abstract no one knows what you actually do.
The most important thing to recognize when hiring a CMO is that marketing is a broad discipline. Its span includes public relations, analyst relations, demand generation, pipeline analysis, positioning, product marketing, website development, search engine optimization, content marketing, storytelling, sales enablement, case studies, video production, webinars, event marketing, and more. And because it’s 2026, you’re also looking for marketing leaders who are savvy about using the latest AI tools to better generate and execute marketing campaigns.
Anchor On One Thing
No one is good at all these things. So you must pick the one or two areas of focus where you want your marketing leader to have deep expertise. Then you can add other skills through individual hires or external agencies.
If you’re still figuring out positioning and product-market fit, you’ll need someone who really understands your market, target customer, and their pains. If you’re further along and have good repeatability, building pipeline through demand generation is likely the better area to focus on — for most startups, it comes down to anchoring on one of these two functions and executing it well.
When you interview a candidate for this role — or in fact any executive role — you should focus on the challenges you’re facing right now. After all, if you hire them, that’s what they’re going to be working on. It’s nice to know what they’ve done in prior roles, but mostly you care about whether they can help you accelerate growth by unlocking new opportunities.
I recommend throwing at them whatever challenges you’re grappling with, such as:
How can we increase pipeline coverage?
How can we better respond to the competition?
Should we expand into the Enterprise market? If so, how?
How do we improve our product position to be more compelling?
If the candidate demurs, responding with “I don’t know your business…,” acknowledge the concern and then gently prod them to venture forth with whatever ideas they may have. If they still aren’t comfortable, it’s unlikely they will succeed in your organization. While you can’t expect candidates to be experts in your business during an interview, you need someone who can dig into complex problems, ask questions, diagnose the situation, and formulate an effective strategy. You need creative problem solvers.
You’re not going to get perfect answers in an interview, and not every suggestion will be applicable. But you should at least get two or three good ideas when you interview an executive. If you don’t, don’t expect to get good ideas after they join.
Collaboration Is King
One of the most important elements of a marketing leader is that they need to collaborate closely with other executives, especially the head of sales and head of product. But you can’t just ask “Are you collaborative?” Instead, I recommend asking what they look for in colleagues in adjacent organizations. If there is genuine collaboration, you should hear detailed examples of working together on product roadmaps, lead generation campaigns, customer events, or more. If you get anything less, keep looking.
Many tech companies suffer from an “us versus them” mentality between sales and marketing. If an executive has not operated in a highly collaborative environment, they won’t have the right foundation of trust and respect to build upon. If the leaders at the top can’t or don’t collaborate, that behavior becomes the norm throughout the organization. It leads to poor coordination, weak execution, and a lot of finger-pointing.
Don’t Go Too Far Afield
While many marketing skills are generally applicable (good storytelling, quantitative analysis, competitive analysis…), the specific application of those skills is always context-dependent. So when you’re hiring, it’s best to look for those with experience in your particular market segment.
If your business is selling a technical product to technical buyers, you should probably not stray too far from that area. Ideally the marketing leader is familiar with the particulars of selling to your customers or a similar group. If you’re selling infrastructure to developers and software architects, and a candidate has been in the cybersecurity space, that might be close enough. If you’re selling to line-of-business buyers (legal, finance, medical, marketing, etc.), you’ll want someone who is used to demonstrating ROI and case studies that showcase those areas.
Similarly, if you’re looking to build a great product-led growth engine, look for someone who has been successful doing just that. If you’re looking to conquer the Enterprise market, look for people with five or more years in that field. It’s not to say you can’t cross-pollinate some skills, but you want a fast ramp for people, and there’s no shortcut to deep experience.
What you’re looking for is someone with a track record of success in the next stage of growth your company faces. Be careful not to get too far ahead on the revenue curve. If you’re currently on a path from $10m to $30m, an executive who helped grow a company from $200m to $500m or beyond is unlikely to want to roll up their sleeves and personally manage product launches and campaigns.
Often the best approach is to look for the “up-and-comer” who has learned from a great marketing leader, has depth in one or more areas (ideally demand gen or product marketing), and has seen great execution and leadership up close.
Great Managers with Deep Skills
The best marketing leaders I’ve worked with — Pete Baker, JD Peterson, Mike Ryan, Ruoting Sun, Jeff Wiss — all had deep skills and expertise in their domains. They brought a creative approach to problem solving and were highly collaborative. They were also great managers who helped develop talent in the organization. They didn’t micro-manage or second-guess.
When I first joined Duo Security, Jeff Wiss was one of my first hires as VP of Marketing. Jeff and I had worked together several times previously. Duo was quite small at the time (around $6m in ARR), and Jeff was able to build a results-oriented demand gen machine that scaled for years. He was also great at PR and positioning and was highly respected by the creative team. He had huge impact at Duo and even after he left, he was brought back by Cisco as a consultant to help reinvigorate the brand.
5 Key Principles for CMOs
Jeff believes a great CMO needs to live by five key principles: Velocity; Simplicity; Measurability, Predictability, and Repeatability. At Duo he built a high-performance demand gen system so he could say: “If you give me an incremental million dollars to spend, I can deliver $8 million in pipeline and these are the precise quarters in which that pipeline will appear.”
All these top leaders set a high bar for collaboration, creativity, and results that created a high-performance culture through continuous experimentation. What tied all of them together, though, was consistency: launches that had impact, pipeline that grew, positioning that focused sales, and teams that got stronger under them. That’s the track record you’re hiring for — a repeatable pattern of making the people and numbers around them better.
The best CMOs don’t just build the growth engine — they get behind the wheel and drive it.
Hiring execs is always hard. I’ve also written about hiring your first VP of Sales and the VP of Engineering.