The 3 Marketing Roles Every $5M to $20M Business Actually Needs

The most common marketing hiring mistake I see isn't hiring badly. It's hiring the wrong role entirely.

A business turns over $8 million. The CEO decides it's time to get serious about marketing. They hire a head of marketing, or a CMO, or a brand manager, or a social media person, or a content writer. Often it's whoever they could most easily picture doing marketing.

Six months later, the business has a lot of content and not much pipeline. Or great brand awareness among people who can't afford the product. Or a perfectly optimised email sequence going to a list of 400 people.

Most businesses have the wrong marketing roles. Not the wrong people. The wrong roles.

The three roles that actually matter at $5M to $20M

At this revenue stage, you're past scrappy and not yet enterprise. You need marketing that's commercially focused, consistently executed, and strategically guided. That means three distinct capabilities, in this order of priority:

1. The executional generalist

This is the person who runs your marketing day-to-day. Not a specialist. A strong generalist who can write a brief, coordinate a designer, schedule a campaign, pull a report, and manage a content calendar all in the same week.

Most businesses skip this role and hire a strategist or a specialist first. That's the mistake. Strategy without execution is just documents. Specialists without a generalist coordinating them produce siloed work that doesn't connect.

2. Strategic oversight

This doesn't need to be a full-time role at this stage. What you need is someone with enough experience to set the direction, read the commercial signals, and tell you when something isn't working before you've wasted six months on it.

This is often where fractional CMO arrangements make sense. The point is that the executional generalist needs someone above them who can connect the activity to the commercial outcome.

3. A specialist bench, not a specialist hire

You don't need a full-time SEO person. Or a full-time paid media person. Or a full-time graphic designer in most cases. You need reliable access to those skills when the work demands them.

Building a small roster of vetted specialists you can bring in as needed is far more efficient than hiring them full-time at a stage when the work doesn't justify it. The key is having someone to brief and manage them, which takes you back to point one.

The order matters

Get the executional generalist right first. Add strategic oversight. Build your specialist bench. In that order. Most businesses do it in a different order and spend two years correcting it.