Case study
Five placements in five months for Unitary AI
Five placements in five months for Unitary AI while its commercial functions were being established.
Read the case study- 5
- Placements
- 5 months
- Elapsed across the programme
Adjacent roles
Marketing recruitment for B2B SaaS and AI companies
Search for Marketing Managers, Heads of Marketing and Marketing Directors in venture-backed SaaS and AI companies — the people who build pipeline alongside sales rather than brand in isolation.
100+
GTM placements over five years
40 / 60
Split of placements across the US and EMEA
25%
Of placements at executive-search level
10 days
Average to identify the ideal candidate after intake
Marketing is the part of go-to-market where job titles hide the most variation. A Marketing Manager at one Series A company runs demand generation single-handed; at another the same title runs events and content while a founder owns positioning.
We recruit marketing at manager, head-of and director level for companies between Seed and Series C, and we start by naming which of those jobs is actually being hired.
The roles we run
- Marketing Manager
- The first or second marketing hire. Broad, hands-on, usually demand generation plus content, reporting into a founder or a commercial leader.
- Demand Generation
- Owns pipeline contribution: paid, lifecycle, SEO and the conversion path from first touch to booked meeting.
- Product Marketing
- Positioning, messaging, competitive narrative and launch. The hire that decides whether sellers can explain the product.
- Head of Marketing / Marketing Director
- Owns the number marketing is accountable for, builds the first small team, and sits at the same table as sales leadership.
What good looks like at this stage
The strongest early-stage marketers are comfortable being measured on pipeline rather than impressions, and comfortable doing the work themselves before there is a team or an agency budget.
The most common mis-hire is someone whose track record came from a well-funded machine — an established brand, a functioning demand engine, an existing content library — being asked to build all three from nothing. The skill is real; the environment is not the same.
How we assess
Every candidate is asked to walk through a pipeline number they owned, what they changed, and what happened to it. Vague ownership shows up quickly.
We also test the positioning conversation directly: can they explain a technical product to a non-technical buyer in two sentences, and can they say who it is not for. That answer separates marketers who sharpen a go-to-market from marketers who decorate it.
Marketing and sales are hired together
We run marketing searches inside the same view of the commercial function as the sales and customer success roles, because a marketing hire is only as effective as the sales motion receiving the pipeline.
Where the requirement is a senior appointment — VP Marketing or CMO — it runs through Leadership Search, with mapping and confidentiality handled accordingly.
Selected clients
- Cursor
- Planhat
- Branch
- Unitary AI
- Sweep
- Anima Health
- FullStory
- Acoustic
- Optimizely
- VertoFX
Common questions
- When should we hire our first marketing person?
- Usually once founder-led sales has proven a repeatable message and the constraint is reach rather than proposition. Hiring marketing to discover the positioning is expensive; hiring marketing to scale a proven message works.
- Should we hire a Marketing Manager or a Marketing Director first?
- If the work is execution — campaigns, content, events, demand generation — hire a hands-on manager. Hire a director when there is a budget and a team to direct, or when marketing needs to own a pipeline target and argue for it at leadership level. A director with no team and no budget usually leaves inside a year.
- Do you recruit product marketing as well as demand generation?
- Yes. They are different candidate pools and we screen them differently: demand generation on pipeline and channel economics, product marketing on positioning, launch and sales enablement in the field.
- Where do you recruit marketing talent?
- Across the United States and EMEA, with most searches in the Bay Area, New York, London, Amsterdam and Berlin. Compensation is benchmarked to the market the hire sits in, not an average.
Ready to talk about the hire?
Tell us the roles, the markets and the stage. You will get a straight answer on whether we are the right partner, and a market view either way.