Scaling Smart: Why Startups Are Rethinking In-House Marketing Teams

You've secured funding for your B2B tech startup and are now poised for growth. Congratulations! But before you rush to build an internal marketing team, pause and consider a critical question: Is now the right time to hire or is there a smarter way to scale your marketing efforts?

For funded tech startups preparing to accelerate their growth, the need for skilled marketing leadership and execution is clear. However, the traditional approach of building an in-house team has significant challenges that can drain your newly acquired capital and slow your momentum.

Let's explore why many startups are rethinking their approach to marketing as they scale, and how outsourcing could be the key to maximizing your investment and fueling rapid growth.

Four Critical Challenges in Building Your Startup's Marketing Function

For B2B tech companies preparing to scale their marketing efforts, the need for executive-level marketing leadership alongside the execution of marketing programs conflicts with the startup’s budget limitations, time constraints and ability to attract talent.  

To avoid missteps, it’s crucial to understand the challenges you’ll likely encounter when attempting to build an internal marketing team:

Challenge #1: Budget Constraints

The financial burden of building a high-caliber marketing function can be overwhelming. Experienced full-time marketing leaders command hefty compensation packages, with annual cash compensation (including salary and bonuses) averaging between $240,000-$350,000. This substantial outlay doesn't account for the additional costs of hiring a team to execute the marketing strategies. 

Allocating such a significant portion of limited funds to marketing leadership can rapidly deplete resources and shorten your startup’s financial runway. And, at this growth stage, the need for a full-time strategic marketing leader is often questionable. 

Startups and scaleups find themselves in a catch-22: you need effective marketing to grow; but, the cost of hiring internal marketing talent could jeopardize your ability to operate long enough to see that growth materialize. 

Challenge #2: Time to Results

Hiring a full-time chief marketing officer or VP of marketing can take months. Even once a hire is made, it takes about 90 days to become fully entrenched in the demands of the role, and then another six months (or more) to achieve real impact. (Source). 

Hiring a marketing team to execute and getting them entrenched takes even more time. When you tally up the months, this puts you at well over a year before you see any results. 

You don’t have that kind of time.

For startups, time is just as precious as money, and building an effective marketing function can be a painfully slow process. Hiring a full-time chief marketing officer or VP of marketing is not a quick fix; it can take months just to find the right candidate. 

Even after a successful leadership hire, it typically takes about 90 days for a new marketing leader to become fully entrenched in the role and understand the company's unique challenges and opportunities. Then, it's usually another six months or more before their efforts begin to yield tangible results. 

The timeline stretches even further when considering the need to hire and onboard a marketing team to execute strategies. When all is said and done, a startup could easily find itself more than a year down the road before its internal marketing team is in place. 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm going to say it again: You don’t have that kind of time. 

Challenge #3: Building a Cohesive Marketing Function

Startups and scaleups often struggle to build a complete, effective marketing function that balances strategic leadership with tactical execution capabilities. Finding a marketing leader who can develop high-level strategies and manage day-to-day operations, while recruiting a diverse team with complementary skills to cover all necessary marketing functions, isn’t easy (and it takes time). 

What usually happens? Well, it's not pretty. Some startups and scaleups end up with a strategic marketing leader who can talk the talk but has no one to walk the walk. Others have a great team of doers but no one steering the ship. 

Challenge #4: Attracting Top Marketing Talent

Startups face significant hurdles when attracting and retaining high-caliber marketing talent. The industry’s best talent isn’t looking for work (they are either employed or being wooed away by more established companies with robust resources and higher salaries).  Attracting skilled, experienced marketing professionals willing to leave stable positions for the inherent risks of a startup environment is more than hard. It’s almost impossible. 

At the end of the day, startups need to fill positions quickly. This leads to a rushed hiring process, a mismatch between the startup's culture and the marketing candidates’ expectations, and the onboarding of a marketing team that won’t (or can’t) meet your needs. 

The Solution: Outsourcing Marketing to a Full-Service Agency

Faced with these challenges, B2B tech startups are opting to outsource their marketing function to seasoned full-service agencies instead of hiring internal talent. 

Why? Because with a full-service marketing and PR agency, B2B tech startups can: 

• Get up and running quickly: Reduce hiring from months to weeks. Reduce team entrenchment from 90 to 30 days. 
  
  
• Tap into a team of experts: Leverage the expertise of veteran B2B tech marketing and PR professionals who have helped hundreds of startups succeed. 
  
  
• Balance strategy with results: Find the sweet spot between expertly crafted marketing strategies and flawless execution of integrated marketing and PR campaigns, content creation, and sales enablement. 
  
  
• Maintain financial flexibility: Retain the ability to adjust budgets without resorting to layoffs, which can negatively affect team morale or productivity for remaining team members.
  
  
• Scale with ease: Ramp up or down quickly based on your needs (without the overhead of full-time employees).
  
  
• Gain fresh perspectives: Benefit from external partners who bring new ideas and innovative approaches to your marketing strategies.
  
  
• Maximize cost-effectiveness: Optimize your budget by outsourcing certain functions rather than building in-house capabilities, often at a lower overall cost.
  
  

For startups, every decision—from budget allocation to execution and speed to market—affects your company's runway and trajectory. Working with an experienced full-service marketing agency can be a game-changer. 

It allows you to focus on the big-picture strategy, without getting bogged down in day-to-day marketing tasks. Full-service agencies (like JONES) offer comprehensive solutions, bringing together specialists in branding, inbound and outbound marketing, public relations and more. This integrated approach ensures a cohesive strategy that drives results across all marketing channels.

Ready to accelerate your growth with strategic marketing?

Our team becomes an extension of yours, aligning marketing strategies with your sales goals and fostering cross-functional collaboration. We don't just strategize and plan—we execute, implementing both short-term tactics and long-term strategies across the entire marketing and communications spectrum.

Bypass the risks of building an in-house team. Outsource your entire marketing function to a full-service agency marketing and PR agency and fast-track your startup's success.

Let JONES be your strategic marketing partner. We’ve been in business for more than 20 years and have helped hundreds of B2B tech startups succeed. If you want to be next, book a meeting on my calendar.