Posted on LinkedIn by Steve Martin -CMO of Act!

Marketing builds companies, but too many growing companies leave marketing for last. 
Perhaps they have a few executives and a small sales team to get started or rely on freelancers to fill the pre-launch marketing gaps. But it’s not long before they realize that it’s not a particularly effective approach. 
Here are some signs you need to make your first marketing hire:

1. You realize you have no strategy. You’re sending emails, posting blogs, running ads, but feel you're getting nowhere. Aiming everywhere isn’t aiming anywhere.
2. You’re spraying and praying. You’re hiring freelancers to take pieces of the work or you have an agency giving advice. But you’re spraying money in a lot of disjointed places, hoping for a unified outcome.
3. There’s no filter. Maybe you see a cool new marketing tactic or tool and decide to leap toward it. Maybe you decide to try this new thing you heard about on some marketing podcast. 

If that sounds like you, it’s probably time to invite dedicated marketers into the discussion. Without a marketer on the team, you have no filter. There’s no one pushing back on ideas that may or may not align with your market and your sales goals. Professional pushback ‌keeps your efforts focused.

Without a marketer centralizing your efforts, you’ve created silos in your go-to-market initiatives — freelancers are simply taking on exactly what you’ve asked them to do. They work in isolation without the benefit of an overall strategy.

Without giving marketing a seat at the table, you’re losing ground to the competition. 

The best time to invite marketing into the discussion is early on in the product development process. Too many startups wait until too late in the process, and then marketing resources are spent chasing arbitrary goals instead of driving a go-to-market strategy.