The Field is a bi-weekly newsletter about how marketing is designed and run in eMobility companies. It's written from the perspective of a fractional CMO working with founders, CMOs, and commercial leaders in the eMobility field.
The senior marketer trap
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Hi Reader, This weekend edition of The Field is about a pattern I see repeatedly in scaling B2B tech companies. Growth slows down. Marketing becomes more important. The company decides it is time to professionalise the function. The logical step feels obvious. Hire a Head of Marketing or a Marketing Director. The expectation is simple. Once this person is in place, marketing will finally be “handled”. In practice, that is rarely what happens. What I’m seeingIn many scaleups, the senior marketing hire arrives with a clear mandate. Bring structure. Define priorities. Help the company grow. But when the role actually starts, the situation often looks different. There is no real marketing team yet. There may be a designer, someone helping with social media, or a founder still running parts of marketing. But there is no execution capacity to consistently produce output. At that point the senior marketer faces a dilemma. The company expects momentum. Marketing activity needs to increase. But the resources to execute simply are not there. So the director starts doing the work themselves. Writing posts. Building presentations. Setting up campaigns. Updating the website. Trying to keep everything moving. Not because it is their role, but because there is no one else to do it. The role mismatchA marketing director is not an execution engine. The role exists to define direction. Clarify positioning. Decide which markets to prioritise. Align marketing with sales. Build the structure of the marketing function. Execution is something else entirely. Content creation. Campaign building. Distribution. Performance optimisation. The day to day work that keeps marketing visible and active. Those two things are often confused in scaling companies. When execution capacity is missing, the director ends up trying to do both strategy and production. The result is predictable. Strategy gets pushed aside. Output becomes inconsistent. The quality rarely reflects the level of seniority that was hired. The company concludes that the senior hire has not changed momentum. In reality, the system was never set up for that role to succeed. How I’d approach itIf I were responsible for building marketing in a scaling B2B tech company, I would treat direction and execution as two different parts of the same function. A senior marketer defines the direction. Execution capacity needs to exist around that role. That can be an internal team, or it can come from external partners if building a team is not realistic yet. But without execution capacity, strategy will not translate into momentum. Hiring a director does not automatically create a marketing function. Execution still has to happen somewhere. Your perspectiveIf you have seen this pattern in your organisation or in companies around you, I would be curious to hear how it played out. You can simply reply to this email. I read every response. Enjoy the weekend, Theo Reichgelt Connect with me on LinkedIn Unsubscribe | Update your profile | Meander 251, Arnhem, 6825 MC |
The Field
The Field is a bi-weekly newsletter about how marketing is designed and run in eMobility companies. It's written from the perspective of a fractional CMO working with founders, CMOs, and commercial leaders in the eMobility field.
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