A short YouTube excerpt (Jason M. Lemkin) advising hiring managers on the single most important criterion for hiring a head of marketing: the candidate must have previously held and met a quantifiable target (e.g., leads, MQLs, pipeline, opportunities). Lemkin warns most candidates lack prior ownership of a committed number and recommends using that question to disqualify many applicants.
When you go to hire your first head of marketing, VP of marketing, director, whatever you're going to call her, but your head of marketing, there's just one criterion you should look for and nobody does this. And they make a hire and the hire fails. You need just one thing. They have to have hit and held a number. It could be a number of leads per year, it could be opportunities, it could be pipeline, it could be MQL's marketing qualified leads, it could be sales accepted leads. It doesn't really matter where they're in the pipeline. When you go to meet a so called head of marketing, you will find, believe it or not, the 95% of the candidates you meet by hooker, by crook, they never held a commit, they never owned a number in a pipeline. So you can rule out 19 out of 20 candidates when you ask them. What number did you hold at your last startup? Well, I mean I did. It was best efforts. Okay, what number did you hold? I worked mostly on brand. Later you'll need brand, right? You need someone that held the number.
