A major pitfall I’ve seen in early-stage B2B SaaS companies is building a strategy that requires a team of 20 FTE marketing veterans to execute.
How do you lead effectively and generate the results your company needs when you can't afford a full team of A-players?
It’s a common problem for leaders transitioning from mature companies (who can afford fully-staffed, high-performing teams) to an early-stage or bootstrapped company.
Suddenly, there’s time and resources are extremely limited, and each dollar and minute spent has a high opportunity cost.
This blog post will explore strategies to maximize a small team’s potential to do big things. You’ll learn how to hire effectively within constraints and adapt your leadership style to fit the capabilities of your team.
Ultimately, you’ll unlock your team’s full potential and will create an agile team of masters who regularly beat the larger teams of your competitors.
When transitioning from a company with ample resources to a leaner environment, it’s easy to feel the pinch.
You have limited capital and resources and you’re often competing against much larger companies. It can feel like an unfair fight because it is.
More often than not, you’ll be outmanned and outgunned, particularly the earlier you are in a company’s growth cycle. But even though it’s not fair, you still have to fight and win.
To be successful, you have to take an approach similar to that of Billy Beane, the manager of the Oakland A’s during the late 1990s and early 2000s and popularized in the movie “Moneyball”.
Unlike Billy Beane, you probably won’t be able to take as statistical an approach to building your team as he was able to. However, you will have to bring a team of relatively inexperienced and inexpensive people together with a common goal to beat much larger, talented (on paper anyway) and better-funded competitors.
Kalungi’s founder, Stijn Hendrikse used to run global SMB marketing for Microsoft Office 365A. In that role, he had a huge budget and almost limitless resources. However, when he transitioned to leading B2B SaaS startups, he realized that it's not just about the team size or talent, but how you strategize, manage, and optimize a completely different set of resources.
Large enterprises require their employees to all have very specific roles and narrow, well-defined scopes, and they require their teams to have deep expertise in each of those roles.
In a large company, you may have access to top-tier talent, comprehensive training programs, and the luxury of time to develop strategies. This method works because large companies can afford to pay for that expertise, onboarding, & strategy.
Startups, on the other hand, require employees to wear many hats, be very comfortable with ambiguity, and often can only afford to hire smaller, less experienced teams. Additionally, your resources are limited, and the timeline for results is often compressed.
This isn't necessarily a drawback—it’s an opportunity to recalibrate your leadership style and team structure. This environment demands a different approach to leadership, where agility, creativity, and efficiency become more critical than ever. If you can do this effectively, you’ll have a more agile team that’s more focused and can actually deliver greater results than the larger, more experienced marketing departments at your competitors.
Below is a list of a few steps you can take to make sure you have the right marketing team at your early-stage company and that you can generate the results you need, within the budget you have available.
If you want to be successful with a small or inexperienced marketing team, first and foremost, you need a really clear idea of what you want them to achieve and how they’re going to do it.
Take the time to build a solid marketing plan that directly flows into your Go-to-Market strategy. Make sure that you know your industry and competition like the back of your hand.
You must have a clear and well-documented strategy for resonating with your prospects, differentiating from your competitors, and convincing your Ideal Customer Profile to “pay, stay, and refer others”.
This step cannot be skipped.
It can be tempting to push for results before a strategy is in place, and think that you’ll “test your way into a strategy”, but this rarely results in good outcomes, because testing without direction or a strategy behind it is liable to randomize your efforts and reduce your impact.
Additionally, the time you spend testing is time not spent building a strategy, and usually results in your team spending more time and effort to get less traction, than if you were to lock in the strategy before turning on your demand generation efforts.
If you can build a good strategy, this gives your team a great idea of where they fit in the company’s vision, where they need to focus their efforts, and what they should spend their time on.
But more importantly, it tells them what they shouldn’t spend their time on, limits distractions, and ensures that their effort has maximum impact on the business.
Try this:
Once you have your strategy, it’s time to make sure you have the right team.
Hiring in a startup isn’t about finding the perfect candidate with a star-studded resume. It's about finding individuals who are eager to learn, adaptable, and ready to dive into the trenches.
In early-stage companies, it’s often more effective to hire someone with potential and train them to meet your needs rather than holding out for an A-player who might be out of your budget.
If you can spend the time early with high-potential employees, you can create a team of high-performing marketers who have the exact skills you need, have all the relevant industry knowledge, and are exceptionally loyal. This is because you took a chance, leveled them up, and helped them to advance in their career.
Look for hunger, not just experience:
A candidate’s drive and willingness to learn can often outweigh years of experience. According to McKinsey, companies that prioritize potential over experience see a 30% higher retention rate among new hires. When interviewing, ask questions that reveal a candidate’s curiosity and willingness to take on new challenges, such as:
Verify resilience
You need team members who are comfortable with ambiguity and can handle the unpredictable nature of a startup environment. Consider asking candidates the following questions to learn about their resilience and likelihood to thrive in a startup environment.
Test critical thinking
During the hiring process, challenge candidates with homework to showcase their critical thinking and push past the surface-level responses that are given in an interview.Give them a hypothetical scenario that is vague and requires them to ask additional questions or fill in gaps with assumptions and push them to present a deliverable, strategy, and tactical plan related to what their responsibilities will be at your company. Then pressure test their output with tough questions that examine their assumptions, knowledge, and plan.
Throughout the process, try and get a sense of how they think about tough problems, what resources they use to solve them, and how they take feedback or differing opinions. Ultimately, this process should give you a much better idea of how they’ll perform in their job than you’d get in a few behavioral interviews.
Ensure culture fit
None of the above points matter if your candidate doesn’t fit your culture. Even A-players who are overqualified for their roles can easily become toxic to your team and company if they don’t exemplify your core values day in and day out. Make sure to build culture-fit questions into your interview process to make sure that your new hire will get along well with the team, support & challenge them the right way, and help make your company culture stronger, not weaker.
Get the right person for the right seat
On the other hand, if your new hire is an incredible culture fit but doesn’t have the skill set to be successful in the role, that also doesn’t work for you or your company. Make sure that you have the right balance of culture fit and abilities to fill the right need for your organization. This means you may have to say “no” to really talented people who aren’t a culture fit or who are a culture fit and are talented, but not quite in the area you need.
Both are difficult decisions to make but it’s critical that you stay strong and build the right team for your business to be successful. This piece is critical and will often be one of the main factors that make or break your success as a company.
Actionable takeaways:
Just because your team is less experienced, doesn’t mean that you have to do everything yourself.
In fact, it’s critical that you don’t fall into the trap of making everything your responsibility. This makes you the bottleneck and will simultaneously burn you out with too much work while making it exceptionally difficult to hit your company’s growth targets. You need to “delegate and elevate”.
That is, you need to give away tasks to your team while empowering them to take on more responsibility, and free yourself up for the big picture, strategic items that are critical to your team’s success, and that only you can accomplish.
As a leader, your effectiveness is not measured by how much you can do personally but by the results your team can achieve, e.g. how well you can enable them to perform.
This transition can be challenging, especially if you’re used to being deeply involved in every aspect of the work. However, it’s essential for scaling your impact and allowing your team to grow.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you can just dump all of your responsibilities on your team and go play golf or read a book. The key to making “delegate and elevate” successful is to give the team you’re delegating to, everything they need to be successful.
Before you delegate something away, you need to sit down and put some real time and brain power behind ensuring that they have the following things:
By addressing these five elements when delegating tasks, you help ensure that your employees have the clarity, resources, and support needed to succeed. You also foster their growth and confidence in their roles.
Actionable takeaways:
What does “empower your team” actually mean, especially if they’re less experienced? And how do you “delegate and elevate” effectively with a team of different maturity levels?
Taking a hands-off approach may work with high performers, but will cripple junior employees. On the other hand, micromanaging will stifle high performers, stunt the growth of junior employees, and add a ton of work to your plate.
So how do you get the most out of your team and use them to fill the right gaps, while extending your talents across the business?
Lead your team from where they are with a framework like Situational Leadership.
Situational leadership is a powerful tool in guiding your team, particularly in a startup. The key is to tailor your management style to the current capabilities and confidence of your team members.
This approach involves shifting between showing employees how to do something, giving close instruction while they do it, being hands-on, and stepping back based on the task and the individual’s experience level.
For example, when a team member is new to a task, they may need more direct guidance (S1: Directing). As they become more competent but still lack confidence, you might shift to a coaching role (S2: Coaching), providing support while allowing them more autonomy. Eventually, as they become proficient, your role transitions to delegating tasks with minimal oversight (S3: Supporting), and finally, empowering them to make decisions independently (S4: Delegating).
Actionable takeaways:
What if you aren’t building your team from scratch, but you’re taking over during a transition?
Usually, when you’re taking over in a transition, there’s a reason for that transition and things may not be going as well as they could be for your team. Maybe performance could improve, you have a challenging quarter or year ahead, or you’ve inherited a marketing team after the leader they loved left (by choice or by force).
Kalungi often takes over marketing teams during times of transition, where team morale is low, and there’s a lot of uncertainty.
To turn these rough waters into smooth seas, we try to quickly establish trust, set a clear vision, give the team opportunities to improve and take on new responsibilities, and align the team’s goals with the company’s strategic objectives. Additionally, building a culture of transparency and open communication is vital to our success.
We especially like using techniques like the "I intend to" framework from David Marquet's book, Turn the Ship Around!
This framework shifts the responsibility for decision-making to the team, empowering them to take ownership of their roles while holding them accountable for the results the team needs to achieve.
Instead of waiting for orders, team members say, "I intend to [action]," which prompts a discussion if needed but otherwise allows them to proceed. If the action is wrong, the leader will correct and discuss why the action is the wrong one. If the action is right, the team member has given the right level of visibility, and gotten the green light from their superior.
Overall, this approach fosters accountability, encourages proactive behavior amongst a team, and keeps the marketing leader from becoming the bottleneck, which can happen all too often in marketing teams that try to do too much and are stretched too thin.
Navigating the complexities of marketing leadership in early-stage SaaS companies requires a thoughtful and adaptive approach.
The strategies outlined in this post emphasize the importance of maximizing your team's potential, even when operating within tight budget constraints. By setting a clear strategy, making strategic hires based on potential rather than just experience, and tailoring your leadership style to match the team's evolving needs, you can transform a small, inexperienced team into a powerful force that drives significant results.
Remember, the key to success lies in your ability to adapt, lead with agility, and empower your team to grow alongside your company's ambitions.
As you refine your leadership approach, you’ll not only build a team that can outperform larger, more resource-rich competitors but also foster a culture of resilience, innovation, and continuous improvement.
With the right mindset and strategies, your lean marketing team can become a competitive advantage, driving your startup's success in a challenging and dynamic market
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