The pressure to grow starts the day the investor’s check clears. Because growth requires more bandwidth and people, the first conversation usually turns to hiring.
That may be the right move for some roles. When it comes to marketing, though, it’s worth slowing down before defaulting to headcount.
What worked with a small, scrappy group while you were finding product-market fit is rarely what you need to scale. The focus moves from getting programs out the door to producing results that the sales team can actually build pipeline upon.
At the same time, pressure on marketing intensifies quickly. In many companies, sales expectations rise sharply after a fundraise, and marketing is expected to generate demand immediately. When growth depends on hiring, time slips away and trust with sales erodes faster than most teams expect. That pressure is what pushes teams into hiring decisions before they have enough information.
Those hiring decisions are usually based on assumptions about which skills will matter, and for how long. Teams make permanent commitments before they know where leverage will actually come from.
The risk isn’t just choosing the wrong skill set. It’s getting locked into it. New hires get pulled in multiple directions, become default generalists, and learn how to navigate the system rather than fix what isn’t working. Meanwhile, critical initiatives stall while teams wait for someone to ramp, take ownership, or get up to speed.
Once hiring begins, those assumptions harden and rarely get questioned until results start to fall short.
Why This Logic Breaks Down After Funding
Under pressure, teams reach for decisions that feel safe and defensible.
Hiring fits that instinct.
But what feels like forward motion in marketing actually slows the business down by limiting flexibility at the moment it needs it most.
The problem isn’t the decision to hire. It’s the assumptions that come with it.
- The first assumption is that more people will immediately translate into faster growth. In practice, new hires don’t produce right away.
They need time to ramp and integrate, which slows execution at the exact moment acceleration is expected.
2. The second assumption is that the skills you think you need right now will still be the skills that matter once growth accelerates.
Right after funding, most teams are still learning where demand actually comes from, which channels will scale, and what sales needs in order to have better conversations. Hiring in that moment locks you into capabilities before those questions have answers.
3. The third assumption is that hiring helps you solve the problem in front of you. More often, it narrows your options to whatever the new hire already knows how to do.
Teams double down on what they know instead of what the business actually needs. Tools get chosen because someone has used them before. Strategy starts to follow the skills on the team instead of the problems the business actually needs to solve.
This is how reasonable hiring decisions start working against growth instead of accelerating it, and why the pressure ultimately lands on go-to-market leaders who are expected to adapt faster than the organization they’ve been locked into.
Where Hiring Starts to Work Against You
The problem shows up quickly. Headcount increases, activity expands, and results barely move.
In a three- or four-person team, there’s no room for specialization once complexity increases, so every hire gets spread across too many responsibilities.
In that environment, marketing generalists can only deliver work that is good enough. The signal quality (aka intent) generated by outbound suffers, sales gets pulled into conversations that go nowhere, and trust starts to erode.
Sales wants signals that lead to meaningful conversations, and leadership wants clear answers about performance.
At the same time, the work has shifted from launching and learning programs to expanding execution while improving efficiency, but the team doesn’t have the depth to make that happen.
Campaigns run longer than they should. Content goes live without being grounded in real sales conversations or its consumption yielding any usable lead intelligence. Decisions get made to keep things moving rather than to improve outcomes. Over time, teams learn how to frame results, explain performance, and avoid revisiting decisions that didn’t pan out, and the cycle repeats.
That’s with capable hires.
When a hire turns out to be weaker than expected, the problem compounds. The role is difficult to unwind, expensive to replace, and hard to challenge once work has been organized around that person.
Instead of fixing the system, the system adapts to the limitations of the hire.
Paid Media Is the Most Obvious Example
If there’s one place this problem shows up most clearly, it’s paid media, and we see it repeatedly.
Early on, most teams can run ads without much scrutiny. Budgets are relatively small, mistakes don’t carry much risk, and underwhelming performance can usually be written off as part of learning.
That changes quickly after a raise.
As budgets increase, sales teams expand, and with more mouths to feed, the pressure on marketing to supply demand rises sharply. In that environment, lead volume almost always grows faster than lead quality, especially when the system rewards activity over end results.
Meanwhile, in-house operators learn which metrics satisfy leadership, which experiments invite scrutiny, and which problems are better handled quietly.
Results get explained rather than examined, performance gets framed at the surface level, and attention shifts toward what looks acceptable instead of what is actually working.
As marketing continues sending sales a steady stream of low-quality signals about which companies or individuals are worth outreach, complaints surface quickly and trust erodes quickly.
This is the predictable outcome of incentives and visibility that do not require direct accountability for wasted spend, especially as complexity and pressure increase.
At the same time, no one person can reasonably maintain deep expertise across every platform. Meta, Google, LinkedIn, programmatic, CTV/OTT, sponsorships, and emerging channels all behave differently, and each has its own ways of quietly burning money if you do not know what to watch for.
That is why agencies separate these roles and rely on specialists who work deeply within a single platform across many accounts.
Seeing the same patterns repeatedly, across different budgets and situations, builds judgment that a single in-house marketer running one account simply does not develop.
Most in-house marketers operate inside a single company with no meaningful external reference point. They do not see how other teams are navigating the same platforms or where market conditions have shifted, and when performance starts to slip, the conversation often moves away from diagnosis and toward explanation.
That is why paid media is so often the first place performance degrades after a raise. It demands specialization and constant adjustment at exactly the moment small teams are least equipped to provide it.
Why the Right Agency Is the Smarter First Move After Funding
Right after a fundraise, the problem isn’t headcount. It’s building a predictable revenue engine fast enough to show momentum.
This is where the right agency makes a meaningful difference.
Not a vendor brought in to execute a single function like SEO or branding, but a partner that has worked with many high-growth companies and understands what actually works today, not what worked a decade ago.
That experience shows up in sales results. When marketing helps sales understand where to spend their time, which prospects are worth pursuing, and which activity is just noise, the number of real sales conversations increases.
Agencies that have seen this stage repeatedly don’t need months to learn what matters. They know where waste hides and which changes tend to unlock momentum, allowing teams to move faster and create impact sales actually feels.
Just as important, an agency provides flexibility while the business is still taking shape.
Early on, the priority is getting a predictable flow of qualified sales conversations as quickly as possible.
A few months later, once the pipeline has some predictability again, the focus can expand. Improving signal quality and tightening execution remain critical, but there’s finally room to invest in longer-term work like education, thought leadership, and problem awareness.
With an agency, those shifts don’t require rehiring, reorganizing, or locking budget into roles that may not fit six months from now.
In practice, this often costs about the same as one or two senior full-time hires.
The difference is staying flexible while the business is still taking shape.
Instead of committing early to a fixed set of skills, you get access to a broader bench that can adapt as the business changes.
Over time, that same agency can help you see which roles are worth owning internally and even introduce candidates when it makes sense to hire deliberately.
Hiring still has a place.
It just works better when it’s informed by execution and pattern recognition, not guesses made under pressure.
We’ve laid out the full argument—why building marketing an in-house agency feels right after funding, where it breaks down in practice, and how teams create leverage without locking in headcount too early—in Why Building Marketing In-House Slows High-Growth SaaS Down.
