Recently we asked Mike Volpe, former CMO for HubSpot, about what skills and attributes he looked for in hiring modern marketers as he helped grow the firm from 5 people to over 900 people. He shared that in the beginning they hired generalists, people with a broad base of skills. But as HubSpot started to scale they started to look for specialists, people with a deep level of expertise in a specific area.

They also looked for what he called “T shaped people”.

These are people with a deep level of expertise in one area, but also a broad understanding of marketing. For example, in hiring a pure content person, or a PR person, they looked for those people to be well versed in what a funnel looks like, and how the various stages of the funnel relate to each other.

Mike Volpe is a successful entrepreneur and startup executive with expertise in marketing, business development, strategy, and lead generation for Cloud, SAAS and B2B software. Mike is currently a member of the Board of Directors of both Attend and Repsly. Previously he was CMO for HubSpot where he joined as employee #5 and grew the company to over 900 people. He also grew the company from around a dozen beta customers to over 15,000 customers in over 90 countries and $100 Million in revenue.

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Season 1. Episode 14: The T-Shaped Marketer