Leadership Search
VP Marketing recruitment
Search for the marketing leader who owns positioning, demand and pipeline contribution — not brand in the abstract.
300+
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 leadership is the GTM appointment with the widest variance in what the title means. A demand-generation leader, a product-marketing leader and a brand leader are three different hires, and companies routinely interview all three for one role.
Tipped runs marketing leadership search for venture-backed SaaS and AI companies, starting from what the business actually needs solved rather than the requisition title.
Which problem is being hired against
- Positioning and product marketing
- The product is strong but the market cannot articulate what it is or who it is for.
- Demand generation
- The message works and pipeline volume is the constraint; the hire owns a pipeline number.
- Category and brand
- The company is creating a category and needs narrative, presence and credibility at scale.
- Full-stack Series A leader
- All of the above, with a team of one to three and a founder still closely involved.
What we assess
Pipeline accountability first: whether the candidate has ever carried a sourced-pipeline number and can explain how it was measured, attributed and defended in a board meeting. Marketing leaders who have only reported activity metrics are visible immediately.
Then positioning capability, tested live — the candidate takes your product and reframes it for a specific buyer. Then the relationship with sales: how they handled disagreement about lead quality, and whether sales leaders they worked with would rehire them.
AI companies specifically
Marketing an AI product means explaining a capability buyers are simultaneously excited about and sceptical of, in a market where every competitor claims the same thing. Proof, benchmarks and specificity matter more than volume of content.
We recruit across AI infrastructure, applications and agentic products, and screen marketing leaders for the ability to hold a technical conversation with founders and engineers without outsourcing it entirely to product marketing.
How the search runs
Retained or exclusive, mapped rather than database-led, with a shortlist of three to five appointable candidates and a written rationale for each. Where the mandate is genuinely full-stack we present candidates against each of the possible shapes so the trade-off is explicit before offer stage.
Proof
Cursor
Tipped helped Cursor make its first EMEA sales hire, with the successful candidate introduced within seven days of the search beginning.
Read the case study- 7 days
- From search start to introducing the successful candidate
- First
- EMEA sales hire for the business
Selected clients
- Cursor
- Planhat
- Branch
- Unitary AI
- Sweep
- Anima Health
- FullStory
- Acoustic
- Optimizely
- VertoFX
Common questions
- Should a Series A company hire a VP Marketing or a demand-generation manager?
- If positioning is settled and the constraint is pipeline volume, a strong demand-generation hire delivers faster and costs less. If the company cannot yet explain what it is and who it is for, that is a leadership problem and a senior hire is justified.
- Do you recruit CMOs?
- Yes, where the scope genuinely warrants it. For most Seed to Series C companies a hands-on VP Marketing outperforms a CMO title, and we will say so at intake if that is what the brief suggests.
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.