Structure Your Marketing Team for Growth

Kipp Bodnar
ThinkGrowth.org
Published in
5 min readJan 13, 2017

--

When I joined HubSpot in 2010, a marketing team reorg every 6–12 months was common — meaning I’ve gone through 10+ reorgs in my seven years here, two of them as CMO. The last reorg we undertook was our biggest yet and involved restructuring our team of 300+ sales and marketing people.

So, why all this restructuring? Simple. We are constantly positioning ourselves for growth.

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen says:

The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies.

In other words, a good team structure with clear decision-making and resource-allocation processes is also the exact thing that will squash innovation and prevent you from leveraging new growth opportunities. Restructuring is a strategic tool — it upsets established processes and clears the path for innovation.

Let me give you some examples.

There are four inflection points I’ve observed at HubSpot that tend to indicate something in our marketing team structure has started to impede rather than accelerate our ability to leverage emerging opportunities.

#1. Gaps appear in the funnel

HubSpot was always strong on top-of-funnel metrics (TOFU). Then about four years ago, we saw a big gap emerging in the middle of the funnel. Our lead to customer conversion rate wasn’t that great, and our team just wasn’t setup to optimize for mid-funnel — so we restructured.

We set up “mini CMOs” who owned each of our persona segments, and a few experimental segments as well (at the time that was things like e-commerce and international). This change gave specific individuals the authority to create a great mid-funnel experience for their segments.

It paid off. Conversion rates for the segments our mini-CMOs were targeting improved substantially. Restructuring acted as a tool to help us close that gap in our funnel.

But it also created a new problem…

#2. Collaboration debt gets too big

The way you structure your team sends a strong message about what your team is currently prioritizing and deprioritizing. I’ve become more intentional in how I think specifically about deprioritization. By prioritizing something, you are always deprioritizing something else, and whatever you place in the deprioritize bucket creates debt somewhere in the organization.

Think of this as “collaboration debt”. It’s the thing that inevitably emerges as process changes, new lines of communication open, old lines of communication close, and the team grows. Eventually, your shiny new structure will begin accruing collaboration debt.

This is exactly what happened in the example I gave above. The mini-CMO model was perfect for fixing our MOFU problem, but as our team grew, this model started to break. It gave clear priority to the mini-CMOs to do what it takes to make their segment successful, but it didn’t give them a pool of resources, and the rest of the marketing team had their own priorities.

One of those mini-CMOs has a story about at a time he rented a minivan and hired a freelance videographer to help him shoot an e-commerce customer case study in Maryland (reminder, HubSpot is based in Boston). The video team had their own priorities to juggle, and those priorities didn’t align with the mini-CMO’s.

That is what collaboration debt looks like 😳

Let me be clear, this story doesn’t implicate any parties involved. Leaders, and the org structures we create, cause these scenarios. A structure that was once a growth driver, was now inhibiting growth. It was time to change again.

#3. Changes in our distribution model

Another inflection point at HubSpot that led to a reorg was changes to our distribution model. For years, our go-to-market strategy was inside sales. We were structured to consistently do well with that distribution model.

Then about six years ago we made the first foray into channel sales, starting with our partner program. Today the partner program represents 40% of our total revenue, and there’s no way we could have made this happen without changing our sales and marketing team structures to capitalize on this growing channel.

We just hit this inflection point again as we made our first foray into freemium with our free CRM product.

With an inside sales model, growth is dependent on strong alignment between sales and marketing. In the freemium model, growth is dependent on strong alignment between marketing and product. Restructuring our team places priority on the connection between those two teams.

#4. Consumer behavior shifts

Marketing gives a huge advantage to first-movers. Andrew Chen calls this “the law of shitty clickthroughs.” He uses the example of online ads. The first online ads were served in 1994 by HotWired, the CTR was an unimaginable 78%. Today, CTR on Facebook ads hovers around 1%.

The first-mover opportunity today is in audio and video. Our blog gets 4.5 million visitors every month, we have thousands of content offers responsible for 60k leads every month, and our content ranks on the front page for just about every sales and marketing keyword out there.

In spite of this success, we don’t believe text-based content is the future. Instead, we’re making big bets on video and audio content.

Our content team released their 2017 strategy and one the omissions in their plan is “text-only campaigns.” I couldn’t be happier about this 😎

Our most recent reorg supports this strategy by making video and audio channels a priority. We’ve tasked people with focusing exclusively on Facebook Live and Instagram Stories, we’ve hired on The Growth Show, and we’ve cut down the leads goal our social team has traditionally been responsible for so they can put weight into helping build our awareness at the top of the funnel.

It’s possible this will create a short-term gap in our lead-gen efforts and we’ll need to readjust again to address that gap in the funnel, but for right now, this is the best possible organizational structure for our team. If needed, we’ll adjust in the future.

Some thoughts on organizational design

You can see in every single one of these scenarios that each new structure creates its own set of problems. bhorowitz puts it this way:

The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad.

This is the catch-22 all leaders need to deal with: You need an org structure even though that org structure will eventually evolve to stifle your growth.

The goal isn’t to find a perfect org structure. Instead, find a structure that is right for right now, one that reflects what you are currently prioritizing — and deprioritizing — and sets you up to leverage your current growth opportunities.

I would go so far as to argue that if you’re not restructuring, or don’t see the need to, you’re missing out on growth opportunities. Team structures get stale. Restructuring is a powerful tool to upset the rigid processes that kill flexibility, collaboration, and innovation.

Yes, changing up your org structure can be daunting and will always involve trade-offs (and create new problems), but it’s worth it.

--

--