I hired someone to do sales, marketing, and finance. A COO. 100 an hour + equity.
I came from a background where everyone was amazing. They get the shit done. High trust. High professionalism.
Our marketing and sales are in shambles.
No ad, sales pipelines. No calls booked and told me cold our reach is dead. My CTO took over and we have a 11% open rate. We have a mediocre SEO.
Ultimately, this is my fault. I'm a new inexperienced CEO with no understanding of sales, marketing and finance.
Didn't set KPIs and have strong accountability. Just kept believing the excuses. Failed trial after failed trial.
And our product is easy to sell. It's a magic moment. Every single person that uses it loves it and everytime it gets into a business it spreads like wildfire.
We have 300k of runway left and this person had a fucking year to build marketing and sales infra. What a god damn blunder.
Any advice.
I have to set up better SEO
Conversion pipeline
Sales Pipeline
Remarketing pipeline
Social Media pipeline.
Anything that I am missing? Any advice to get out of this god damn mess?
Man, I really blundered a hire.
byu/Round_Progress4635 inEntrepreneur
Posted by Round_Progress4635
10 Comments
100 an hour + equity doesn’t usually get you sales, marketing, and finance these days. A better bet is to focus on 1 or 2 at a time. And it shouldn’t have taken a year to let the person go. I’ve got sales, GTM, and Ops experience. Happy to chat if you’re interested.
Did you get a CRM out of it, or sales playbooks/battlecards? ICP definition? USPs? Customer journey?
Legit you can get Claude Cowork to do a backlinks/SEO audit of your stuff. Add Lightfield to all your calls and it’ll build your CRM in the background and handle follow ups. (No affiliation, but I use it.)
Metrics wise, what’s actually broken and what’s working? Are you still getting revenue and growth?
I’d say start with an audit.
-What do you have?
-What do you know?
-What’s working that you want to build on?
-What’s hair-on-fire bad vs. what’s just kinda bad?
You’re the CEO, your job is to ruthlessly prioritize in order to keep the ship afloat. Start with what’s floating, then plug the biggest hole. Optimize later.
Bring in a fractional CMO and an experienced tech sales professional. Your problem was conflating three connected but distinct disciplines into one position, and not clearly defining roles and responsibilities.
While you sort that out, do you have access to any reputable performance marketing agencies or freelancers to help you get some quick wins, and right the ship in the interim? Do not let this sense of urgency push you into making another poor hire.
Hire slow, fire fast.
There’s a reason why most CEOs have a sales background. There’s really no way to vet sales in the beginning beyond just being there.
The marketing gap is painful, but it is fixable fast if you make one person accountable for pipeline and reporting. I would use Notion for the KPI board and Runable for a quick revamp of the deck and landing page copy.
Stop engaging with these AI bullshit stories.
I’m a fractional CMO and could fix your problem. I bill out at $400/hr though.
Bring in a Marketing consulting firm in your vertical with a commission structure (let them help Assess, Plan, Execute marketing plan). Bring in a Sales team from your competitors (in addition to experienced sales reps, this will also bring in customers leads) and make pay package bonus/commission heavy in a stepped approach (ie: first x sales = y%, next x+x sales = higher %/bonus, next x+x+x sales = higher %/bonus). Finance = bring in consulting firm until you find competent employee to hire. As CEO, you need a STRONG right hand person (COO, Chief of Staff, President). I missed something in your post – WHO is handling Human Capital/Resources? Happy to chat.
Most of the advice here is about what to do next but I think there’s a step missing before that. You mentioned the product is easy to sell and people love it but at the same time there’s no pipeline and no calls.
That might be a sign that something is not fully clear between who the product is for and how it’s being presented. If that part isn’t clear, adding more structure or tools won’t fix the core issue, it just makes the system more complex.
I’d probably take a step back and figure out exactly where things are breaking before trying to fix everything else.
The biggest thing hiring for any role or for any project is setting up proper accountability, reporting, KPIs, Success Criterias, regular updates. Leaving someone for a year to work on their own and then waiting for the results to just appear one day is foolish and working blindly. I found that mediocre employees will suddenly start performing exceptionally if proper monitoring and clear guidance is there from leadership. Its not always their lack of capabilities or a skill issue, sometimes its getting aligned with your vision and goals.
This is of course assuming the employee is sincerely working and putting in 100% of their efforts to their role and assigned tasks/projects.
The SEO, Ads, Content Creation, Social Media, and IT teams in the company I work for were in shambles and I was put in charge of each unit without being an expert in any one of those fields yet I was able to get the team organized and delivering results just by getting them on the same page as leadership, listening to their feedback, getting them to explain to me why they think their approaches to a problem will succeed, setting up standards, protocols, etc for each unit. Now I have been put in charge of R&D and there still isnt a dedicated lead for those units but the teams are still performing even without me as I left them with a structure on how to work.
Hopefully me sharing was beneficial for you or someone else. Thats my 2 cents in the matter.