What kind of marketer do you need to hire into your startup? When is it time for your first VP Marketing or a CMO? How do you know if you’ve outgrown your CMO? Is this so overwhelming for every SaaS founder?

Marketing isn’t about the tactics. It isn’t about what we do next. It’s about what problem we’re solving — for the business and for the customer.

We’re often told that experience is our best teacher. But, our experience is often a myth. To motivate buyers, we have to find the gap between the myths we’ve spun for ourselves…and the myths they’ve spun for themselves.

Whether you’re in service or software, you’re built to solve a problem for people who will pay to solve it and have chosen to pay you. You have to have a sense of urgency for solving that problem. And empathy for those people. Here’s why — and how the right CMO or CXO can help you do it.

These are the questions I ask in every brand story interview. If you’re feeling like you and your team(s) aren’t speaking the same language, something isn’t clicking with your ideal customers, or your growth has stalled out, block of some time (at least 45min if not longer) and give these questions a try.

When you say (what seems to you) the obvious thing, you might find you’ve made connections no one else thought of. Sometimes saying the obvious thing builds connections between people because it’s the obvious thing to people like you who think things like that. So. Say the obvious thing. See what happens. Repeat.

If we’re always looking at where we’ve been, we not only have no idea where we’re going. We’re likely to end up tumbling through with no direction. Sort of the mere mortal’s equivalent of the twisties.

Whatever we do -- building a product, launching a new feature, crafting a campaign -- we need to name explicitly the problem we’re solving. And it has to be written down, clearly and simply, so everyone involved is reading off the same script.