How to Organize a B2B SaaS Marketing Team

I’m writing this to my former self. It’s another one of those articles I wish I would have found a few years ago when I had just started as a CMO. I searched high and low for examples of B2B SaaS Marketing org charts for larger teams (not startups). There were a couple decent pieces from a talk by Bill Macaitis, the CMO Club, Gartner and SiriusDecisions, but nothing that gave me what I needed.

What I really wanted was for other CMOs and senior Marketing leaders to just share their org designs with me. No theoretical discussions. Just show me how you operate. So, that’s what I’m going to do here.

In the two years I’ve been a CMO, I’ve done three major reorganizations. The first was when I first got the job, the second after a large acquisition, and the third as a result of a reduction in force. Each time I had a slightly different context, but my objective was always the same: identify the optimal design to facilitate the most growth with the fewest people.

So in this post I’ll give you three things: the org design, the considerations and the debates.

The Org Design

This is where I’ve landed after three iterations. And because some functions operate a little differently at different companies, I’ll describe the core of each function a bit more in detail.

Marketing Ops: Includes planning, analytics/reporting, lead management, lead scoring, lead routing, campaign ops, email governance, MarTech stack and MarTech budget ownership. Leadership for this team needs to be 40% strategic and 60% in the details of how everything works. Too in the weeds or too pie in the sky and this group won’t create the engine you need to run the team.

Integrated Marketing: Includes product marketing, org-wide campaign strategy and planning, pricing and packaging strategy, and the biggest company-wide global events. This team is really your strategic center for Marketing (understanding the customer, competitors, differentiation, and how that storytelling cascades across all Marketing efforts).

Digital Marketing: Includes all paid channels, SEO, website strategy and engineers, email/chat/SMS, cart and engineers, all self-serve revenue (non-sales led efforts), and optimization. This is the global digital agency supporting the rest of Marketing. This team also includes ownership for a revenue number for all the credit card transitions.

Demand and Field Marketing: Includes teams for each major segment in North America (Enterprise, Commercial, Government) and EMEA and APAC. Each segment or regional team includes demand gen strategy, regional/segment field marketing, and account-based marketing. These teams mirror the Sales org and are responsible for alignment and collaboration. This group takes on some of what would generally be considered customer marketing activities. They are the “face” of Marketing to Sales.

Brand Marketing: Includes brand strategy, design, copy, user experience, video, creative production, social, developer relations, content marketing, and customer advocacy. The balance with this team is to always balance innovation and creativity with execution. It’s not easy and it’s some of the most important work.

Communications: Includes executive thought leadership, public relations/all external communications, analyst relations, crisis communications. This small and mighty group manages regional agencies to support their efforts.

Dotted Line Relationships: Finance and People. These are the only two truly “dotted line” relationships that are really critical for the CMO. My VP of Marketing Operations and I mostly plan the budget at a high-level every year, my FP&A partner ensures that we follow that plan throughout the year. Given that the biggest percentage of Marketing spend is not headcount spend, you need a very strong Finance partner who understands the “why” behind all of the different types of spend for Marketing, how they are measured differently, and spend pacing. They also need to create frameworks for your teams to operate within to ensure you’re spending to target (not below and certainly not above).

HR is the other critical partner that doesn’t report to the CMO, but is vital to our team and culture. I’m super lucky that my HR partner is a dream partner. They help me with talent assessments, leadership coaching, management training for my people leaders, organizational design, etc. The right HR partner will be embedded in your teams and start to understand how the entirety of Marketing works. Without that broader context, I think it’s hard to understand how all the different talent and performance needs of Marketing are distinct from other major functions.

The Considerations

Obviously there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to org design, so here are a few other considerations for you.

Don’t Design Around Personalities: It’s really tempting to design teams and functions around certain personalities. You might try to avoid a long-time team member leaving by not giving them functions you should give them. You might be trying to keep a key talent by giving them things they want (but aren’t ready to own). Or, you design around the skills of a particular person and not what the team or company needs from your org design. Just don’t do it. It’s too painful to unravel. You’ll find the talent you need for each iteration. Design the team to best meet your objectives.

Balance Expertise with Spans and Layers: At a certain scale, you need to specialize in Marketing. It’s a function that’s different from others (like engineering or sales) because you can’t have social, design and paid acquisition all reporting to the same leader. At a certain point, you do need some specialization and smaller teams. Having said that, I do think that it’s all too easy to create way too many layers of leadership in Marketing. Like anything, it’s a balance, but don’t invest your precious dollars in lots of layers of leadership. You need to invest in a really strong VP/SVP layer and a front-line manager layer and a great base of talent. Keep it as simple as possible. It makes the work more efficient and minimizes your headcount costs.

The Debates

There are a lot of differing views on Marketing org design that I’ve come across in the last few years. And ultimately every CMO needs to do what’s best for their industry, company, and objectives. As you’re thinking about a re-org or joining a new team, here are a few hotly debated choices to consider.

• Centralized vs. Regionalized: We need to serve a global customer base and so we do align our Demand Generation and Field Marketing teams to specific regions and segments. In North America, we have teams aligned to major segments and we have regional teams in EMEA and APAC. This enables us to align to the Business Development, Sales and Customer success teams in each region while enabling the domain expertise in the functions that I believe are better centralized such as Digital, Brand, Integrated. At a certain size and scale, I can see hiring more specialized functions in each region or having regional specialization sitting in centralized teams.
• In-house vs. Agencies: In this age-old debate, the answer is of course “it depends.” For certain specialities, it makes sense to outsource. We use agencies in different regions where we need regional support for Communications. We use an agency for niche/cutting edge digital channels or to support our website team. Some Marketing teams completely outsource their paid acquisition work or creative work. I believe that in-house teams do the best work for 80% of what you need to accomplish. Outsource for the last 20% of niche needs. Similarly, places like AirBnb view doing all creative in-house as the secret to their success.
• Business Development in Sales vs. Marketing: Call this team whatever you like (Business Development, Sales Development, etc.) but I believe it needs to live with Sales. You just need to ensure a really tight partnership between your demand gen, lead management and business development leadership teams to make it work.
• Product Marketing in Marketing vs. Product: Product Marketing lives in Marketing. Full stop. I’ve seen it live in both Product and Marketing at small and large scale. Product Marketing fundamentally exists to drive growth and I believe it needs to be embedded and aligned to the go-to-market functions in order to accomplish that objective. When it lives in Product, the function starts to blur with Product Management too much and falls apart.

Constant Change

One of the things I’ve learned is that these Marketing teams are constantly changing. To be clear–I wouldn’t recommend three major reorgs in two years, but I would say that if you’ve sat with your current design for over a year you’re probably due for some shakeup (self-imposed or otherwise).

Evolve your org design and talent faster than you’re comfortable with or someone will do it for you (or to you).

A Note of Gratitude

Over the few years I’ve spoken with many CMOs to whom I’m eternally grateful: Claire, Nate, Sara, Marta, JT and many more. They shared their mistakes and battle scars with me around organizational design. Ultimately we all know there’s never one right answer. There’s just a lot of trial and error. To those of you who shared your org charts with me: you’re the inspiration for this article. My hope is to pay it forward. Thank you.