Sophia Philippou on why SaaS marketing titles mislead, and how to hire a Head of Marketing for the growth problem you're actually solving.
Hire for the growth problem, not the title.
This is the thinking behind Perpetuate's Marketing practice.
Sophia Philippou, Perpetuate
The best SaaS marketing hire isn't defined by title. It's defined by the growth problem you're trying to solve.
Marketing titles are becoming increasingly unreliable.
A Head of Marketing in one software company might be a hands-on first marketing hire building the function from scratch. In another, they might lead a team of 20 across Brand, Demand Generation, Product Marketing, Growth and Communications.
A Growth leader might own acquisition in one business, activation and monetisation in another. A Product Marketing Manager might primarily support launches and sales enablement, or they might own positioning, category strategy, competitive intelligence and enterprise GTM.
The title tells you surprisingly little.
What matters is the context they have operated in, the growth problems they have solved and whether those experiences translate to yours.
Before we think about titles, seniority or potential candidates, I want to understand what the business actually needs Marketing to achieve.
Those are very different problems, and they require very different Marketers.
If the challenge is unclear, it's very easy to default to hiring a familiar title and creating a broad job description containing everything you would ideally like Marketing to do.
But once the growth problem becomes precise, the title, the seniority and the shortlist start to follow from it.
A Marketer who was brilliant at one stage, or in one GTM motion, can easily be the wrong hire in another.
That's why I map several things about a company before I approach the market.
Business stage matters. A Seed or Series A company building its first repeatable GTM motion needs something different from a SaaS company scaling beyond $10m ARR, preparing for international expansion or moving towards an exit. The level of ambiguity, resources, expectations and hands-on execution can be completely different.
The GTM motion matters. Sales-led, product-led, partner-led and hybrid businesses place different demands on Marketing. Someone who has built a high-performing enterprise demand engine isn't automatically the right person to drive PLG acquisition and activation, and vice versa.
The customer and ACV matter. Selling a $5k self-service product to SMBs is fundamentally different from helping Sales close $250k enterprise contracts involving procurement, security, finance and multiple senior stakeholders.
The product and category matter. Marketing an established category with known buyers and established budgets is different from creating demand for something the market doesn't yet know it needs. In a new or emerging category, the first challenge may be educating the market, defining the problem and creating the strategic narrative around it.
And finally, the growth challenge matters. Awareness, acquisition, conversion, retention, expansion, enterprise penetration, international growth and repositioning each call for a different combination of experience.
This is where traditional recruitment can struggle.
Search for a "Head of Marketing" and you'll find hundreds of people with the right title. Search for "Product Marketing Manager" and you'll find hundreds more.
But titles and keywords don't tell you whether someone has actually solved a comparable problem.
I am much more interested in questions like:
That's where the real matching happens.
There's another trap in Marketing hiring: recruiting for the company you are today rather than the company you're trying to become.
If you're about to move from SMB into enterprise, the strongest candidate may not be the person with the most experience in your current customer segment.
If you're shifting from founder-led sales towards a repeatable GTM engine, you may need someone who has already lived through that transition.
If you've reached product-market fit but awareness is now the constraint, that's a very different Marketing brief from a business with strong inbound demand but poor conversion or retention.
The question isn't simply, "Who is a great marketer?"
It's:
"Who has solved something sufficiently similar to the problem we're about to solve?"
That changes the search completely.
At Perpetuate, we don't start a Marketing search by asking which candidates have the right title.
We start with the business context:
From there, we work backwards to identify the environments, companies and people most likely to have built the capability you need.
That might lead us towards a Product Marketing leader, a Growth marketer, a commercially minded Head of Marketing, a Demand Generation specialist or a CMO.
The answer isn't predetermined by the org chart.
The growth problem defines the search.
Once the growth problem is precise, the title, the seniority and the shortlist follow from it.
Sophia Philippou leads Perpetuate's Marketing practice.
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