How to structure the marketing team at a 40-to-200-person company

At 40 to 200 people, marketing usually has to cover five jobs with one or two people: positioning, content, sales materials, campaigns, and the systems that report on them. Keep the work that needs daily product and customer contact in-house, bring in senior strategy and specialist skills, and add a leader once there is a function to lead.

You're the CEO of a company you have just bought, or the operating partner who watches the plan, and the marketing team is one or two capable people stretched across everything. The question is rarely whether they are good enough. It is how the work should be divided so the company gets senior direction without hiring a department.

Key takeaways

• A marketing team at this size has five jobs to cover, and few companies can staff all 5 in-house.
• The people you employ should own the work closest to the product and the customers.
• Senior strategy and specialist skills are usually cheaper to bring in than to hire at this stage.
• Add a marketing leader once there is a working function for them to direct.
• At this size, marketing usually works best reporting directly to the CEO.

Five marketing jobs still need covering, even with only 1 or 2 marketers

Before deciding who to hire, list the work itself. At a company of 40-to-200-people, it falls into five jobs:

Few companies of this size can staff all five with employees, and trying to usually produces one person doing five jobs at half depth. The content and search job in particular depends on how buyers find you, which SEO and AI search for B2B companies that grew on word of mouth covers.

Keep the work closest to customers and sales inside the company

The people you employ have the one thing an outside team cannot buy: Daily contact with the product, the sales team, and the customers. Give them the work that depends on it.

That usually means sales materials for live deals, the internal knowledge that feeds content, coordinating with sales on what buyers are asking, and running the systems once they are rebuilt. It also means owning the relationship with any outside help, so the company keeps control of what gets published and why.

What they should rarely carry alone is the positioning decision itself. That needs senior judgement and a view from customers, and asking a junior marketer to decide it puts them in an impossible position. The method behind that decision is set out in portfolio company positioning.

Bring in senior strategy, specialist channels and one-off systems work

Three kinds of work tend to be cheaper and faster to bring in at this size than to hire for:

• Senior strategy. A positioning answer and a plan, written by someone who has done it before, without waiting a quarter for a hire.
• Specialist skills. Search, paid media, or video, used at the level the company needs rather than as a full-time role.
• A systems rebuild. A one-off project to clean up the customer record and reporting, then handed to the in-house team to run.

Each of these is a defined piece of work with an end point, which makes it easier to buy than to hire. What a systems rebuild involves is covered in GTM modernization after an acquisition, and the realistic options for outside help are compared in who actually does marketing for mid-market portfolio companies.

Hire a marketing leader after there is a function worth leading

A senior marketing leader pays off once there is a function to lead: A current message, working systems, content already producing, and enough people that the leader directs rather than does. Hired before that, a leader spends their first quarter building the basics they were hired to manage.

The useful sequence is to get the message and systems working first, then hire into a function that already runs. The leader you eventually hire arrives to a written positioning document and a clean customer record, which the CMO gap covers in more detail.

At 40-to-200-people, marketing should usually report to the CEO

At 40-to-200-people, marketing usually works best reporting directly to the CEO. The positioning decision belongs at that level, and the CEO is the one person who can settle disagreements between sales, product, and marketing about who the company is for.

Reporting into sales is common and workable for sales materials, but it tends to pull the team toward short-term requests. If marketing does sit under sales, agree in writing which work is protected from deal-by-deal requests, so the longer-term work on message and content still happens.

How a 60-person software company split five marketing jobs across two marketers

Take a newly acquired Nordic software company we work with: Around 60 people, 600+ customers, two marketers, no CMO. Both marketers were capable, and both spent most of their week on requests from sales.

The work was divided along the lines above. Senior positioning work came from outside, based on interviews with the larger buyers the company was now winning. A specialist partner rebuilt the near-empty systems and then trained the two marketers to run them. The two marketers took ownership of sales materials and the internal knowledge behind content, and reported directly to the CEO. A leadership hire stayed on the table as a later decision, once there was a function to lead.

FAQ

Keep customer knowledge in-house and bring in the expertise you do not need full-time

List the five jobs, give your one or two marketers the work that depends on product and customer contact, bring in senior strategy and specialist skills for defined pieces of work, and hire a leader once there is a function to lead. Keep marketing close to the CEO while the message is being settled. No random acts of marketing.

If you would like this structure set up for a company you have just bought, the value-creation programme for portfolio companies shows how the work runs and where to book a strategy session. You will leave with a bird's-eye plan, whether or not we work together.