Hiring, Managing, and Leading: Lessons from a B2B CMO

Drawing from a recent conversation with Julien Sauvage, CMO at Cordial, here are practical insights on hiring, managing, and structuring marketing teams.

Hiring: Focus on Authenticity

Sauvage starts every interview with: "My goal is to make this feel like not an interview." This simple approach helps candidates relax and show their authentic selves.

When evaluating candidates, he looks at both function-specific skills and cultural fit:

For Product Marketing roles, he tests capabilities through situational questions:

• "Walk me through a situation where you got stuck with product because they weren't shipping that feature in time and you still had that launch coming up next Monday morning."

• "What was the before and after state? What were the impact metrics you owned?"

Rather than asking direct questions like "Are you data-driven?" (who would say no?), he focuses on real examples and measurable impact.

Managing Different Experience Levels

For Early-Career Marketers:

• Provide frameworks and playbooks for structure

• Get hands-on with the work - "Even if my team was 50 people, I would still like to get my hands dirty"

• Balance quick wins with strategic planning

For New Managers: Start with a detailed team assessment:

1. Evaluate current state

2. Identify gaps

3. Create action plans for struggling team members

4. Develop growth paths for high performers

Structuring Marketing Organizations

For a $50M+ company, Sauvage recommends these core functions:

1. Product Marketing

2. Demand Generation

3. Events (separate from demand gen)

4. Marketing Operations

5. Content (including customer marketing)

6. Brand (including PR, executive comms)

On structuring Product Marketing teams specifically:

"I like aligning by function. Someone owns positioning/messaging, someone owns enablement, someone owns compete... If you align PMMs by product, you expect them to be a Swiss army knife and be good at all these things for that one product. It's just not realistic."

He suggests a hybrid model: primary ownership by function (like compete or enablement) with secondary mapping to specific products.

Career Development Advice

Sauvage emphasizes that climbing the corporate ladder isn't for everyone:

"It's okay if you don't want to be a CMO. It's perfectly fine if you actually want to stay an IC person, very deep, your whole life."

His key to success? Relationships.

"It's been about the people I've met, the people I've coached and the people who have mentored me... You got to be able to hire and be hired at any time."