When I talk to founders & CEOs who want to work with Blue Seedling, I always ask this question:
Why aren’t you hiring an in-house marketing leader?
It’s a genuine question – I want to understand how they think about it. Plus it’s always great when the prospect does the selling for you by explaining why a substitute won’t work. 😉
Yesterday, a smart founder & CEO shared three spot-on reasons:
1️⃣ No single hire can cover all bases. Marketing is a team sport, even in an early stage startup. No one person can master everything—positioning, brand, storytelling, demand gen, RevOps, project management. You need a team.
2️⃣ Hiring takes time—time you don’t have. A VP Marketing is a critical hire and CEOs justly take their time finding the right fit. Also, top talent is *always* hard to get – In a bull market, competition is fierce. In a bear market, the best people aren’t leaving. Either way, hiring a strong VPM can easily take months or more, and time is your most precious resource. This is doubly critical if you’ve already hired a Sales leader, who’s now hungry for pipeline and collateral from marketing. In enterprise B2B, a hire you’re not making in Q1 significantly hurts your 2025 pipeline.
3️⃣ It’s not cheaper. A full-time senior marketer (let alone a team) is a big payroll commitment. Sometimes, flexibility wins.
The bottom line
I’m a big believer that marketing should be in-house—eventually (check out our Hiring series for more). But whether you’re early-stage or scaling, a “marketing team as a service” lets you move faster, reduce risk, and focus on what matters most: growth. 📈
