You Didn't Hire the Wrong Marketer
You hired an experienced marketer.
Nine months later, they're gone.
The budget's been spent. Plenty of activity happened. There are reports, campaigns, maybe even a shiny new brand.
But there's no meaningful increase in sales.
So the conclusion seems obvious:
You must have hired the wrong person.
But what if that's not the whole picture?
What if the problem started long before they joined?
Most business owners hire marketers the same way they hire everyone else. You need an engineer? You hire someone with engineering experience. You need an operations manager? You hire someone who's run operations before. Experience matters because the problems they're solving are broadly similar.
Marketing feels like it should work the same way.
Ten years of marketing experience should mean someone knows how to market.
Shouldn't it?
Not necessarily.
Because marketing experience only transfers when the buyer journey is similar.
And that's where most businesses get caught out.
A buyer journey is simply the process people go through before they're ready to buy. Some buyer journeys are incredibly short - buying toothpaste, for example. You see it on a shelf, maybe you've seen an advert, the packaging looks familiar, into the trolley it goes. Nobody involved in that decision is losing sleep over whether they made the right choice. The whole decision takes seconds.
Now compare that to choosing business software. There are now so many things you need to consider! Can it do what we need it to? Does it integrate with your current systems? Will your team actually use it? What if it fails? How long will it take to implement and will it mean downtime? The list of questions goes on. You need information, evidence, reassurance, confidence. A buyer journey like this is fundamentally different.
And yet many businesses assume the same marketing skills apply to all of them. They don't. The first type of buyer journey needs awareness and attention. The second needs understanding and support. It needs marketing that helps people make decisions. That's a very different job.
Imagine you needed someone to design an industrial railway system. A candidate applies with 20 years of engineering experience. Impressive - except all 20 years were spent designing bridges. Now, they're still an engineer. They understand materials, physics, structural integrity and safety requirements. But railway systems and bridges are very different. Different constraints, different requirements, different expertise.
Hiring an engineer, of course the first question you'd ask is: "What exactly are we trying to build?" Only then would you decide whether their experience matched the problem. Have they built something like this before? Yet businesses routinely skip that step when hiring marketers. Probably because they don't know what kind of marketing machine they're trying to build.
Before you hired your marketer, did you actually define what your marketing needed to do? Did you map your buyer journey? Did you understand exactly who you're trying to attract to your business? Did you identify the questions they need answered? Did you identify what marketing materials they need to build confidence and reduce their perceived risk?
For most businesses, the answer is no. And that's understandable - you're not a marketer, you don't know what you don't know. So you hire somebody with "marketing experience" and assume they'll figure it out.
But that's a bit like hiring an engineer before deciding whether you're building a bridge, a railway, or a jet engine. The problem isn't that the engineer lacks skill. The problem is that nobody defined the problem.
A lot of marketers build their careers in mature categories where the strategy is clear and the buyer decision is already made. A bank who's marketing insurance products. A soft drink who's marketing cola. An airline who's marketing flights. The buyer already understand what insurance is, they already know what cola tastes like, they already know a flight is their best option to get from A to B.
They're not wondering whether they should care about the category - they're choosing between vendors. That's a completely different marketing problem than helping someone understand something entirely new. That's the marketing they learned, and that's the marketing they do.
When they arrive at a business where the buyer journey is long and complex, where the buyer doesn't understand the problem yet, where perceived risk is high - they apply the only playbook they know. Brand campaigns, awareness activity, engagement metrics.
Meanwhile, the buyer is still sitting there thinking: "I still don't understand whether I should spend money on this."
One business owner I worked with hired a Head of Marketing from a company they thought was similar to them. On paper, the hire looked excellent - strong experience, good track record, credible background. Nine months later, they parted ways.
During those nine months they invested heavily in rebranding, campaigns and advertising. Lots of activity. But the underlying problem remained - potential customers still didn't understand what the company actually did, why they needed it, or how it solved their problem.
The marketer wasn't incompetent. They'd simply spent most of their career solving a different marketing problem. Their previous role was about differentiation from competitors in an established category. This role required education about a completely new category.
Before you hire your next marketer, understand your buyer journey. How long does it take someone to buy? What decisions do they need to make? What information do they need at each stage? What creates confidence? What reduces risk?
Only then should you start assessing candidates. Ask questions like:
"What do you think our marketing strategy will have in common with the strategy at your last company?"
or
"What do you think our customer journey will have in common with the customer journey at your last company?
Those questions will tell you far more than simply asking how many years of marketing experience someone has.
Here's the question that matters most: Have I defined my buyer journey clearly enough to know what marketing expertise I actually need?
Because until you can answer that question, you're not really hiring a marketer. You're hiring a guess.
If you want to explore your buyer journey more deeply, my book The Marketing Machine walks through this framework in detail. Or get in touch for a conversation to talk through what your specific situation needs.
Q: How long should I give a marketing hire before evaluating them?
By month 3-4, you should see early indicators - specifically, movement in your conversion rates across different stages of the buyer journey. Are more website visitors clicking "book a call"? Are leads moving through to first meetings? My free guide, The Engineer's Guide to Marketing Measurement breaks down which metrics to watch at each stage. You should also expect them to identify quick wins within your existing customer base - upselling, cross-selling, or referrals - unless you're certain there's genuinely no way to increase sales from current clients (which is rarely true).
Q: What specific questions should I ask a marketing candidate about their experience?
Skip "How many years?" entirely. Instead ask: "What do you think our marketing strategy will have in common with the strategy at your last company?" This tells you immediately whether they understand context - whether they grasp that buyer journeys differ, and that experience in one context doesn't automatically transfer to another.
Q: Can a marketer with FMCG or retail experience succeed in my B2B business?
Honestly, they'll probably find it difficult. Someone brilliant at short-cycle, brand-focused marketing might struggle with long-cycle, education-focused buying. It's a completely different way of marketing, which is a skill they may not yet have learnt.
Q: How do I actually define my buyer journey?
Start with: How does someone go from "I didn't know this existed" to "I'm ready to buy"? What are the steps - how do they first hear about you, then what happens, when do they first get in contact, when do they request a quote? Then think about: Who's involved in the decision? How can we get everyone to say yes? What to they need to see and hear to feel comfortable going forwards with this purchase? My book, The Marketing Machine walks through this framework in detail.
Q: Should I hire a marketing agency instead of an employee?
Agencies have the same problem - most are trained in short-cycle marketing. The difference is flexibility: you can change direction faster with an agency. But you still need to define your buyer journey first, or you'll get the same mismatch.
Q: Should I hire a marketing graduate or someone with experience?
A marketing graduate will have learned frameworks and principles, but probably in the context of fast-moving consumer goods or digital-first campaigns. Unless they've specifically studied long-cycle B2B or complex technical marketing, their training won't match your problem. A new graduate or apprentice might seem like a cheaper option but, without someone to create a strategy for them, they'll probably end up building completely the wrong kind of marketing machine.