Marketing is the single most mis-hired function in SaaS. Not because founders are bad interviewers—but because the role label “marketing” hides wildly different skill sets.

One marketer lives in spreadsheets and funnel models. Another lives in content calendars and social carousels. Both call themselves “marketing”. Only one will move your revenue curve.

Most early-stage teams don’t fail because “marketing didn’t work”. They fail because they hired the wrong type of marketer for their current stage.

This playbook gives you a clear, founder-friendly way to decide: Do you need a senior marketer or a content generalist?

1. Hire based on your stage, not your hope

The first rule: stop hiring for the company you wish you had, and hire for the company you run right now.

Pre-product-market fit (0–$1M ARR)

  • You need scrappy execution, not big-picture strategy.
  • Founder is still the primary salesperson and storyteller.
  • Marketing supports learning: ICP clarity, messaging tests, channel experiments.

Best hire: content-heavy generalist who can ship quickly and amplify your voice.

Post-PMF ($1M–$5M ARR)

  • You have a working product and paying customers.
  • The question shifts from “Will anyone buy this?” to “How do we scale this?”
  • You need to reproduce pipeline with more predictability and less founder heroics.

Best hire: a marketer who understands funnels, pipeline, and basic attribution—often a “demand-oriented” senior IC.

Scaling ($5M–$15M ARR)

  • You’re juggling multiple channels and multiple motions.
  • You need someone who can architect the GTM engine, not just run campaigns.
  • Marketing must integrate with sales, CS, product, and finance.

Best hire: a true senior marketer (Head of Marketing, VP, or Director) who has owned revenue-facing metrics before.

The mis-hire happens when you try to get strategic architecture from a content generalist or hands-on execution from a board-facing VP.

2. Senior marketer vs. content generalist: clean differences

What a senior marketer really owns

  • ICP & positioning: who you sell to and why they care.
  • Funnel design: how strangers become pipeline and revenue.
  • Channel strategy: which levers you pull and in what order.
  • Attribution: knowing where opportunities come from.
  • Budget & tradeoffs: what gets funded, what gets cut.
  • Team building: when to hire specialists and how to manage them.

They think in systems, not posts. Give them a target pipeline number and they reverse-engineer the path to get there.

What a content generalist really owns

  • Copy & storytelling: emails, landing pages, social posts.
  • Founder amplification: turning your voice into consistent content.
  • Light SEO & distribution: getting more surface area for your message.
  • Asset production: case studies, one-pagers, nurturing content.

They don’t architect demand. They make your message sharper, more visible, and more frequent— which can absolutely drive revenue, if the rest of the system exists.

3. Mis-hire patterns that quietly kill momentum

Pattern #1 – Hiring “strategy” before you have signal

A strategist without data ends up guessing, building frameworks for a funnel that doesn’t exist yet.

Pattern #2 – Hiring a content creator expecting pipeline

You get more noise—more posts, more emails, more “brand”—but not more qualified conversations. Visibility is not the same as demand.

Pattern #3 – Big brand marketer, zero-resource startup

The person who’s used to a 10-person team and a $500K budget struggles when it’s just them, a founder, and a spreadsheet.

Pattern #4 – Framework talker, no shipping history

They can reference every GTM model under the sun, but can’t show you a single campaign they took from “idea → shipped → learned → iterated”.

4. The role-definition clarity framework

Before you post a JD, answer three questions:

1. What must marketing solve in the next 90 days?

  • We need pipeline.
  • We need activation and onboarding to improve.
  • We need better messaging and positioning.
  • We need to prove a channel beyond founder-led outbound.

2. What resources exist today?

  • Budget (what can you comfortably spend per month?)
  • Sales capacity (can you even handle more pipeline?)
  • Data (do you have CRM hygiene and basic tracking?)
  • Time (how available are you for collaboration?)

3. What kind of output do you need?

  • Strategic: someone to design the system.
  • Executional: someone to ship assets and campaigns.
  • Hybrid: enough strategy to avoid chaos, enough execution to move quickly.

If your answers skew tactical, you likely need a content generalist or execution-heavy marketer. If your answers skew systemic (pipeline, attribution, channel mix), you’re closer to a senior marketer.

5. Scorecards for both roles

Content generalist scorecard

Must-haves:

  • Strong copy across email, landing pages, and social.
  • Ability to mimic founder voice without making it robotic.
  • High content velocity—comfortable shipping multiple assets per week.
  • Basic understanding of funnels and CTAs.
  • Empathy for the buyer and their world.

Simple working session you can run:

  • Ask them to rewrite one of your recent emails in three different tones.
  • Have them turn a testimonial into a mini landing page section.
  • Ask for three LinkedIn posts based on a short Loom from you.

Red flags:

  • They talk more about “aesthetics” than outcomes.
  • No concrete examples of content that influenced pipeline.
  • They avoid feedback or iteration (“my style is just like this”).

Senior marketer scorecard

Must-haves:

  • Can walk you through a full funnel they’ve owned—top to bottom.
  • Understands attribution enough to know what’s directionally true.
  • Has cut channels before, and can explain why.
  • Talks about revenue, not just leads or MQLs.
  • Has managed conflict between sales and marketing.

Working session prompts:

  • “Walk me through a quarter where you missed your target and what changed next.”
  • “Show me a campaign you’d happily run again, as-is.”
  • “If our pipeline dropped 30% next month, what are the first three things you’d check?”

Red flags:

  • Everything is “a team effort” with no clear ownership.
  • They don’t know their numbers—or they’re vague about impact.
  • They blame sales for poor conversion without owning their part.

6. Interview prompts that separate talkers from operators

Use these questions with either role and listen for specificity, numbers, and ownership:

  • “Tell me about a channel you turned off. Why, and what happened next?”
  • “When marketing is working, what are the first signs you see?”
  • “Show me a campaign or piece of work you’re proud of and walk me through the outcome.”
  • “What did you learn from your last bad hire or misaligned partner?”
  • “If I gave you no extra budget, how would you generate more qualified conversations in 60 days?”
Great marketers talk about tradeoffs, constraints, and learning loops. Weak marketers talk in slogans.

7. 30-day action plan after you make the hire

If you hire a content generalist

  • Build a 4–6 week content calendar anchored in your ICP’s problems.
  • Record a 30–45 minute Loom downloading your story, product, and point of view.
  • Spin that into LinkedIn posts, email sequences, and a few key landing page upgrades.
  • Measure content performance on:
    • Reply rate and click-through on outbound sequences.
    • Meeting quality feedback from sales/founders.
    • Growth in engaged audience, not just impressions.

If you hire a senior marketer

  • Run an ICP and positioning workshop in week one.
  • Audit your funnel: traffic → sign-ups → opportunities → closed-won.
  • Define 2–3 channels to prioritize and 2 to pause for now.
  • Build a simple pipeline model:
    • How many opportunities you need.
    • From which channels.
    • At what conversion rates.
  • Agree on a weekly GTM meeting cadence with sales/founders.

8. Suggested tools & stack by role

For a content generalist

  • Writing & editing: Google Docs, Grammarly, Notion.
  • Design & visuals: Figma, Canva, basic Loom editing.
  • Scheduling & distribution: Buffer, Hypefury, or native scheduling.
  • Light CRM and pipeline visibility: HirePilot or HubSpot starter.

For a senior marketer

  • CRM & pipeline: HubSpot / Salesforce + HirePilot for recruiting GTM roles.
  • Attribution & data: basic reporting first, dedicated tools later.
  • Automation: Zapier / Make to glue systems together.
  • Experiment tracking: Notion templates or a simple dashboard.

9. Founder TL;DR

  • If you’re early and scrappy: hire a content generalist who ships.
  • If you’re proving repeatability: hire an execution-heavy senior marketer.
  • If you’re scaling across channels: hire a strategic leader who has owned revenue before.

When in doubt, bias toward execution—but make sure you know what you’re executing against. Strategy without action is hallucination. Action without strategy is churn.

The job isn’t “hire marketing”. The job is de-risk your GTM with the right kind of marketer for your stage.

If you’d like help scoping the role, building a scorecard, and running a targeted search, that’s exactly what we do at Offr Group.

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