Today in Digital Marketing - EXTRA: Building a Marketing Team (with CMOx founder Casey Stanton)

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

As you advance in your career, at some point you'll be building a team — whether you're a marketing director and you need 2 or 3 people to help support you, or you're the CMO and you need to manage and hire dozens of people.How do you build out a marketing team, especially in this age of remote work?On this special edition, Tod speaks with Casey Stanton. After working in a marketing agency for almost a decade, and a stint as a University professor of marketing, Casey founded CMOx — premiere fractional CMO education and support company.Learn more about them at https://BecomeCMO.comThis is a paid partnership between CMOx and this podcast.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

As you advance in your career, at some point, you'll be building a team, whether you're a marketing director, and you need two or three people to help support you, or you're the CMO, and you need to manage and hire dozens of people. How do you build out a marketing team for almost a decade and a stint as a university professor of marketing, Casey founded CMOX, the premier fractional CMO education and support company. In this paid partnership between CMOX and this podcast, we have been exploring a number of things that affect the role of a CMO, whether you are in that job now or aspire to be there. Casey, welcome back. Hey, Todd. Excited to be back. So CMO's job, you know, often when they first get in is to build up a marketing team. How do you

think about hiring as a process? Yeah, that's a great question. So hiring is obviously a process that takes time. But first, you have to know what you're hiring for. And there's nothing as kind of like frustrating for a new hire than to join a company and then have not and then that new employee not know how to actually make an impact. So before you even hire, it is on the onus of the CMO to work with the CEO to figure out the direction of the business. And we've talked in previous episodes around annual planning and quarterly planning and just like having a big picture. Once you have that big picture, you've got to figure out what's required to get you to that picture.

And then from there, you've got to think of who the roles are. And I like this idea that comes from the entrepreneur operating system, which is the idea of creating an accountability chart, not an organizational chart, but like an accountability chart that shows who is accountable for what outcomes as a role, and then you need to staff those roles. So think through the organization that you're working in, or that you're supporting as the CMO, or fractional CMO or the marketing coordinator or director or whatever your title is, and think of the accountability of each person. And is that accountability clear and straightforward? Does the designer report to the marketing coordinator? Does the marketing coordinator or the marketing

director then manage the relationship between all their direct reports? Or is everyone just kind of horizontal and they all kind of have the same level of, you know, quote unquote seniority or say? And as a result, is there just like too many cooks in the kitchen? So having a good organizational structure and having an accountability chart defined, I think is a primary thing that must happen. So know where you're going and know what roles are needed and how they're going to report to other roles. If you're the CMO or the fractional CMO, which just means that you're the chief marketing officer just for a couple companies, not really anything else besides that, what you're going to have is you want to have direct reports, and you want those direct reports ultimately to have their own direct reports. That way,

you manage a couple people, and then they each manage a couple more people. And that way, you can manage a much bigger team with less mental load for you every single day, on the day-to-day. What does an accountability chart look like? I know what an org chart looks like, but as you describe this accountability chart, which I think is kind of a cool idea, in my head, I see this very complicated with lots of boxes and lots of lines. Does it look like that?

No, I think it's pretty simple. I would say it looks closer to a, like a family tree. So you have the person at the top of the organization. And that person, if you take the EOS approach, which I really like, and anyone listening here should at least be abreast to the ideas from the book Traction and Entrepreneur Operating System. I just think that they're the right way

to run an organization. And they talk about having a visionary. And a visionary is oftentimes the founder, the CEO, and then the person below them is the integrator. So the visionary's job is to be visionary in the organization. They're the person who is supposed to understand the market so well that they're coming up with kind of the big picture things. Like they say, we're going to go acquire a company that's going to increase our company size by 50% or whatever their, their strategy is, but it's big picture and they're not the how people,

they're kind of the what people they're going to say what's going to happen. And then everyone below them helps make their dream come true. So directly below the visionary is the integrator and the integrators job is to integrate all of the ideas from the visionary into the business. And then the integrator below them is your C-suite. So this is going to be your CFO, your CMO, your COO, maybe head of HR. Depending on your business, it might be chief investment officer. There's like chief growth officer.

Those types of titles can kind of come into play if it makes sense. And then below each of those chiefs, if the organization is relatively small, you may just have a handful of marketing people that report to that chief, like the CMO in this situation, or you may have it bifurcated because you might have multiple kind of almost companies inside of the marketing department. Maybe you have a content kind of company that's different than a service company, although they're under the same brand. So you might have kind of separate teams in there, or you might share a team. You may have a marketing director who reports directly to the CMO. And then under the marketing

director, you may have your PPC manager, you may have your designer, your content manager. You may have a, what I like to think of as a tech. So someone who might do server-side development, front-end development, back-end development, whatever. You might say like, oh, maybe Casey, that should be on the, under the CTO or the CIO. And that could be true for a larger organization. You know, the differentiation between a CTO or the CIO, and that could be true for a larger organization. You know, the differentiation between a CTO and a CIO is a CTO is for customer-facing tech, and a CIO is for internal company tech. So you start to kind of think through that, and hopefully you can see, like,

it's not that complex of a layout when you look at the marketing department. It's the CMO reports to the integrator who reports to the visionary, and then who reports to the CMO below them is potentially the marketing director. And if the marketing director has someone like a content manager, it would make sense that the content manager would manage maybe a cadre of content writers. So this is probably not a very deep accountability chart. Just who reports to who and who is accountable. The way that this was kind of taught to me from a client that I worked with was he said that it's the throat to choke. So when the visionary or the integrator want to choke someone's throat about marketing, they reach down to the next person below them, who is the CMO.

It's the one person who's accountable. They don't go down to the media buyer. Right, right, right. Because the media buyer did the best the media buyer could do, presumably, and then reported to the marketing director who did the best they could do, who reports to the CMO. And if it's wrong, then the CMO interfaces directly with the founder, the CEO, the visionary, and they have to solve that problem. You would never want the media buyer to be responding to the CEO. That would be a difficult kind of conversation for that media buyer. And I would expect to, correct me if I'm wrong, that this sort of organizing things, or at least visualizing things as accountability as opposed to an organizational chart means that the accountability structure is a lot more fluid than could probably be captured

in a traditional org chart that is made a pdf and put on an intranet somewhere yeah i think it it can be fluid but generally speaking you want people in seats and uh an individual can have multiple seats. You might say that your content manager is also your content writer, right? Because your organization is relatively small. But if you consider the organization growing over the next few years, you probably want to say that, okay, the content manager manages a writer. They're managing themselves in this situation, but in the future, there might be five writers below them. So I would say that every quarter you're kind of looking to update your accountability chart and hire into that. I'm speaking with Casey Stanton. He is the founder of CMOX, the premier fractional CMO education and support company.

You can learn more about him at becomecmo.com. Let's talk about the nitty gritty here, Casey. So let's talk about hiring, remote workers, risks and so on. Let's talk about the nitty gritty here, Casey. So let's talk about hiring remote workers, risks, and so on. Let's start with hiring. How long should it take to hire someone new into a marketing team? So generally speaking, I think a good number for folks to have here is 45 days. And 45 days is the general time it takes to hire somebody. If you do it right, if you've got a good process. So that process is about understanding their role and the accountability and the things that they're going to do. I have a process that I like folks to do to put together a delegation filter, which says

specifically, if you do your job, great, these are the things that you're doing, at least to get started. So someone shows up to work on day one, and it's pretty clear what they're up to. Then you get that job posted somewhere. And go a traditional route like Indeed. I also think it's helpful to incentivize team members that anytime someone is hired from a referral from a team member, that team member then gets a cash bonus because someone that you already trust that's working with the company, if they're extending their trust saying that this other person would be a good fit, that could shortcut the hiring process and save everyone time and money. One thing to keep in mind around hiring too, is that speed matters to find the perfect fit. If it takes you six months, that's a long time. You know, that's

three and a half months longer, four, four months longer than four and a half months longer than it should take, I think. And what is the, what is the cost of you taking that long? I want a focus. Once I know the job and I've developed the delegation filter for it and got the job post live, I want someone in in 45 days. I don't want to wait 50 days because every extra couple of days, every couple of weeks pushes me further and further away from my ability to achieve a quarterly outcome. So speed is incredibly important in hiring. I think 45 days is a great place to start. And then there is one caveat that's important to keep in mind, which is end of the year.

It's really hard to hire in Q4 if you're hiring a decent, like a non-beginner role, someone who has like decent experience, because they might be in a compensation structure that pays out on an annual bonus. So why would anyone leave in November to join your company? If they could just, you know, continue doing their stuff through the end of the year and then enjoy that, you know, end of the year bonus. All right. So you've got some candidates. You're moving into the interview phase.

I would think that this, and certainly this is the phase where when I'm hiring, I feel the less confident, the least confident in my skills as an executive, even though I've been in the marketing business for almost 30 years now. That's the part of the hiring process that I enjoy the least, doing the interview. So what are some sort of methodologies you've used in terms of getting through that interview so that when you're bringing on candidates into your team, you're getting the best people? It's a really important question. Some folks interview really well, and some folks that are really great workers interview really poorly. So, how do you manage that? Well, the first thing is, how do you evaluate someone's ability to do the work? And again, this onus is back on you as the CMO, which is, you have to figure out what the work is that you're's ability to do the work? And again, this, this onus is back on you as the

CMO, which is you have to figure out what the work is that you're asking them to do. And can you clarify it? So there's the typical things that you should do in a hiring process. Um, you may want to do a background check, you know, like those are relatively inexpensive. They take, you know, two weeks to, to fully run, but you know, that's probably a good thing to do. But that's kind of like a last step. You find a good candidate, and then you run them through a background check. You don't run all your potential candidates through. So what you're looking for here is you're looking for someone who's done it before. They've done something similar before, and I think that's really important.

The best predictor that someone can do something is that they've done it before. The best predictor that someone's going to buy personal development products is that they've bought personal development products before. There's like no other data point that suggests that they're going to be a good buyer. Similarly, who's going to be a good worker? Who's going to be effective? Someone who's been effective before. You might be saying that's unfair to people who are kind of new, who are maybe a little junior. And that's true. Sometimes you got to take a risk and try someone on and see if they're a good fit and they might not have the experience. So with those folks, what I want to do is I want to do two things.

I want to interview them to understand kind of their past experience and the results that they've made. And then the second thing I want to do is I want to interview them based on their ability to demonstrate the core values of the organization. This is a big learning moment for me, which is so many organizations have core values. And when you ask about a company's core values, people roll their eyes, probably because their core values are stupid. And you want a company to have true core values. Do you know what attracts great talent? A fast-moving company. Great people are going to get bored of slow-moving companies.

So if you find that you're wanting to leave a company, it might be because you're not doing anything exciting. So as you have established core values, you then interview people for those core values. There's a core value that you could say like everything world-class, such a great core value. And maybe you're thinking, I don't know, that seems kind of like a platitude, but no, it's not like, are the emails world-class, is the website world-class, is the experience world-class? Are you leading the industry with the best customer experience? That's a cool core value. Another core value I really like is being in the foxhole. Like you're in it. Like if we're going to run a webinar on a Saturday, I expect the team to show up. I'm going to support the team and

give them time off, you know, tell them to leave early and whatever the other days of the week so that I can kind of make up for the ask here. But I want people to show up. You know, I want them in it for the success of the entire organization. I want them bought in. I don't want them saying, oh, it's it's four fifty nine and fifty nine seconds, five o'clock. I'm out. You don't want that person. You want the person who's willing to put in a little extra work. And then I, as the CMO, am not going to ask them to do that unless it's needed. And then it's it's I kind of give them the opportunity to do that on their own. And there's really kind of two approaches or two types of questions I think you would ask in an interview. I mean, one is certainly the technical skills. You know, do you know Photoshop? Do you have the, you know, do you understand HTTPS and sort of the technical stuff? But then there's also the softer questions. One of my favorite interview questions that Google uses commonly, I guess a lot of them use this, but is tell me about an area where you believe Google is underinvested. And it gives it is a great question, because it sort of

it gives you a sense of whether or not that person thinks strategically think sort of long term. In your experience, what what are some other ways that you can get that level of detail out of an interview candidate? Yeah, it's an interesting question, because what you're get that level of detail out of an interview candidate? Yeah, it's an interesting question because what you're asking is kind of a strategic question. And my belief is that the strategy should come top down, generally speaking. You know, the CEO should be a leading strategy. If they're a true CEO and not just the founder who's in the role of the CEO, but if they're really a chief executive officer and evaluating the landscape and choosing a growth plan, then the CMO's responsibility is to figure out how to translate

marketing activity to that outcome. I like to push that strategy down and then ask people to solve for that strategy. I could say to them, how do we get 1,000 customers on our next launch instead of our typical 250? And having those kind of more specific questions that are more based on maybe their experience in PPC or in CRO or something like that could be helpful. But ultimately what I do is I take folks for a test drive. And I think the typical path here is to, if they're coming in as an employee, you don't compensate them for the test drive.

And if they're coming as a contractor, you do. And the idea is that you give them a one or two hour task that you spell out what an outcome is and you give them an initial starting point and you let them deliver that. And getting a test drive is so helpful because it's kind of a bake-off. You can evaluate all of the test drives returned to you and see which ones are actually at the level that you want them to be. An example of that is, let's say you use software like ActiveCampaign. You can say, hey, I want you to go sign up for a free ActiveCampaign account, and I want you to create 10 leads, and I want you to tag these in a certain way, and I want you to create an automation that does this and that. I want to be one of those leads, and I want you to tag these in a certain way and I want you to create an automation that does this and that. And I want to be one of those leads and I want you to trigger an email to me.

Are you open to doing this? If so, can you have it done by Monday at 9am? And if they say yes, then your job is to review those test drives and provide feedback. And oftentimes people don't get everything right. But the way that they think and the way that they present their test drive to you on that next interview is really illuminating of their thought process, of their commitment, of their ability to Google. Did they get on with ActiveCampaign on the phone and have them walk through it because they got stuck? I'm looking for people who have ingenuity, people who are hungry, who are willing to solve the problem, not people who have experience in every potential problem that I need help with in the future. By the way, what is the correct answer to the question, can you move me or how do you move me from 250 leads to 1000 leads? Because there's two potential answers you'll get out of that from a person I would expect. Either you will get the answer. Here's how we should do it. A, B, C, D, and then E and F. Or the answer, I don't know,

how could I know? We haven't talked about your goals, the objective, we have to start with that. Right? Two very different answers. Is there one you're looking for? Like, is there a right answer to that question? Yeah, it's a good question. I'm looking for process. I'm looking for someone who thinks for themselves. I like this analogy of, I want to tell people, you know, we're taking a wagon from New York City to Los Angeles over the next 90 days. Okay, we got to be in Los Angeles in 90 days. And we're taking this wagon. How do we get there? I don't expect someone to know every single turn along the way. How can you know? You don't know what's going to happen with weather before you get there, right? So I want somebody

to tell me how we're going to get out of the city of New York. I want each individual step. I want to hear someone think through how they could even solve the problem. So I want someone to answer the question by telling me, like, let me think about it. Let me think about what we could do to solve it. I want them to ask questions around, well, what's the current cost per lead? What's the cost per sale? What's the conversion rate? I just want somebody to kind of back into it. And it doesn't matter that they know all of the, you know, the right names for everything or have experience in every individual piece of this, but I want them to be the kind of people who are going to attempt to solve the problem and not the kind of person who's going to look for the steps in front of them and be micromanaged. You know, I don't have the time to micromanage people. I have the time to

give people outcomes and support them with resources and a budget. But I expect them to figure out how to get from, you know, New York City to West Virginia, kind of on their own. And then I'll be in West Virginia waiting for them to help them get to the next, you know, to the next spot. How does this whole hiring process change when what you're hiring for, as we've seen in the last year or two, are an increasing number of people who are working remotely? Does it change? So I don't, my experience is almost exclusively in remote work. And what I like about that is you're able to find candidates across the country or

across the globe, kind of depending on your hiring practices. And I find that to be great. I want people that I work with to have a great lifestyle. I want them to be able to take time off and go see their kids and, you know, have their hobbies and actually enjoy life and not be in the office five days a week from, you know, 8am to 5pm with a one hour paid lunch. You know, I don't, I just, that's not the model that I love. And I think when you give people the opportunity to be flexible with their time, but committed to giving an outcome, then they're going to do what's best for them and what's best for the company at the same time without sacrificing. So I think that this boom of remote work is actually a really exciting boom. And I think

it's great for lifestyle and I expect it to persist. What becomes maybe more difficult for a manager that's only managed folks in house before is how do you manage a remote team? And I think to do that, you just have to have some boundaries. One of these premises is what I call working in public. You want to work in public. If you work with a team and you're on Slack, I don't think you should use direct messages, kind of like at all. I don't think you should ever direct message people. I think you should have public channels where people talk to someone. So for example, if you have a content manager, that content manager should have their own Slack channel and any conversations around

content management should be in that channel oh interesting everyone should be able to see it because if they don't see it they don't kind of absorb it through osmosis they can mute it but you want to be able to tag someone into that conversation and not have to spend a couple minutes pulling together um kind of the whole kind of perspective that you expect them to have to you know join the conversation. I've never thought of using Slack that way. That's interesting, yeah. It's a different way to do things.

So I think working in public is helpful. I got this idea because I've been spending an incredible amount of time in these Web3 DAOs. I think DAOs are so fascinating. Wait, wait, wait, what is a DAO? Yeah, it's a decentralized autonomous organization. And it's what I think is potentially the future of organizational structures in some ways. There's downsides to DAOs and there's upsides to DAOs. But the basic idea is how do a bunch of anonymous people on the internet communicate and do something great together well they work in

public they have channels where they're working there's not like i mean you have people literally all over the globe you've got your you know crypto um uh crypto bros who are like in thailand you've got people that are in london you got people all over the world it doesn't matter where a developer is as long as they're developing and you their code through GitHub or whatever. So the way that they work in public, you can look at this great example is like Olympus DAO. That's a strong one. Check out their forum and get on their Discord. And specifically on their Discord, they have an announcements channel. And every time they have a new policy that comes up, that goes in their policy channel. You can't reply to a policy update, but you can react to it. So you can drop an emoji. So you see people kind of interacting,

but they're not clouding a channel. So think about an organization. An organization should work in public, you know, privately. So the whole organization should be able to see the most important stuff that's happening, and it shouldn't go outside of the organization, right? When I say public, I mean publicly inside of the kind of walls of the organization. So there should be an announcement channel when new hires happen, those should get posted and people should celebrate that. Maybe that's a channel that people can reply to,

but only HR can post it. You can have other channels around updates around new products or new events or things that you want the entire company to be abreast to. How do you then get your marketing team to be able to kind of show some work in public so the rest of the company can see it, but they don't have to see the day-to-day details, but they still get that appreciation. So you don't create that like faction of marketers who are in the basement and the sales team who are on the sales floor and they don't work well together you want everyone to kind of be in communication

but you also don't want to create uh unnecessary noise can we talk to the risk averse of them out there because there are people who um who are very careful about about proceeding because they are risk averse what what are the biggest risks in hiring and how do you reduce those? Sure. So there's risks around the secrets of your organization. That's a big risk. There's a risk around people taking customer lists away from you. There's risks around data and privacy or hiring someone and that person doing something really stupid like emailing your suppression list

and then getting your email account shut down and maybe blacklisting your domain. There's the potential for bad actors. And if you have an organization that's really doing something great, you're going to attract people that want to work with you. And you just need to have reasonable limitations on access to things. There's the notion of a zero trust environment, which kind of seems pejorative. It's not like that you don't trust people, but it's that you don't want the organization to be successful by trust. You want to kind of remove trust, which means that certain data isn't available to everybody. You can't have like an Edward Snowden issue where, you know, someone's able to export a bunch of sensitive data and take it with you.

But at the end of the day, what is it? It's one of those razors, Hanlon's razor. You know, like don't attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity. It's like people aren't inherently bad. They're like not looking to screw you. And I guess it could happen, but that's kind of few and far between. So intelligent people that you hire that are focused on an outcome and you track their ability to deliver on that outcome, you're going to be successful. If instead you kind of don't know who you're hiring because you're not really clear on what they're doing, you onboard them, you give them access to everything. You don't really know what measures success.

You expect them to be busy, but you can't measure an output. You can only measure like a time, like they worked 40 hours this week or 50 hours this week. And you feel like that's satisfactory instead of saying that they brought you from 250 to a thousand customers. You know, that's when you're going to start to struggle because you're not going to be able to figure out how your team drives more value. And you have to own that. I was actually speaking with one of the guys on my team. His name's Nabeer yesterday. And he was really happy. He had just put together this really great Google Data Studio for me.

And I said, you know, how is this for you? He goes, this is incredible. I was like, why is this incredible? You like put together a data studio. He's like, it's because you knew exactly what you wanted and I could deliver it. And I feel so good being able to deliver the thing that's helpful. He said, the last company I worked with, I would do a data studio and then they would give me change requests and then change requests and then change requests because they didn't know what they

wanted. So when you know what you want and you find people who you can trust to do the work and you give them the opportunity to kind of earn the respect to do that work and grow into the organization, you're going to build a really robust company and not a company that you have to micromanage because you don't have time to micromanage. Yeah. You know, I'm delighted that you suggested this is the topic a couple of weeks ago because it is one of the things that I think people as they move into a marketing career or up in their marketing career, I suppose, I think they don't realize that HR and management of people becomes so much more important. Can you talk a bit about CMOX, your company? Who would get the most value out of it? What does it do? Yeah, great question. And just before I say that, I want to say that the role of the CMO is in many

ways just to be the role of the leader of the marketing team. Leadership is so important. So with HR comes, you know, like with hiring becomes the need to lead people. Every single day, people are looking for a leader. They're looking to rally around something big, hopefully bigger than what they could do on their own. And they're leveraging a team. And it's that, you know, to use a overused buzzword of like synergy, though, It's like one plus one plus one equals five, or one plus one plus one equals ten. That's what you want to create as an output. You get a couple of great people, you focus them, laser focus, you provide them the resources, and they can do bigger things. That gives them sense of meaning. It's that notion that work gives the man meaning, kind of that old adage.

And you have this opportunity as the CMO to provide meaning to people and to rally them around stuff and to give them a sense of purpose in what they do. And I think that's so important. So what we do at CMOX is we provide fractional CMOs to the world. And we help marketers leave a nine to five, leave an agency or who are agency owners, add fractional CMO services to their business. And we do that by helping them do two things. One is how to attract, convert and serve clients. So we help them figure out their niche, figure out their process to go build a book of business as a fractional CMO, and then go win 3000, 5000, 10,000, $15,000 a month clients as a fractional CMO and then go win $3,000, $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 a month clients as a fractional CMO working a couple hours a week. And then the second thing that we help them do is we help them serve their clients by

building their annual plan and their quarterly plans. And they come together and we all work together on all of our clients at the same time. And we do these great workshops where you come every single quarter and I lead the CMOs in building the quarterly plan for their biggest client. They don't have homework afterwards. They do it all live with me. We've got music. We have a lot of fun. And we have people that are doing significant stuff.

I can think of one of the guys who joined, and within 21 days, he brought in a $10,000 a month client as a fractional CMO. And then two weeks later, he brought in another one at $10,000 a month. So he went from $0 as a fractional CMO to a quarter million run rate in just over a month. And we've got a lot of our members are like that. We've got one member, you know, a little bit slower. It took him a little bit longer for him to win his first client. He took about five and a half months. And then he brought in $15,000 a month in recurring business as a fractional CMO and has built his pipeline so that he continually has the ability to close more

business if he chooses to. And he's got a family and a life. And he can throttle how much work he has and take a really great paycheck for that. So it's, it's just an exciting place. It's a, it's a growing market. And I think the level of support that we provide our members is kind of through the roof. And, um, we're looking just for a couple more, uh, marketers who want to add fractional CMO services, either to their agency or if they're, uh, employees and they want to get some clients on the side and start to kind of break away from the, uh, employee model and start to kind of break away from the employee model and start to have their own thing,

I think that this is a very low-risk way to do that. Casey Stanton, he is founder of CMOX, the premier fractional CMO education and support company. You can learn more about it at becomecmo.com. Casey, thank you for this. Thanks so much, Todd. Really appreciate it.