I’ve been a marketer for 10+ years and only recently started to hear buzz about “marketing operation teams.” I wondered: what the heck? Is that a fancy way of saying “growth marketer” or something??

It wasn’t until Kera, our Head of Marketing at Hustle Fund, told me that a marketing ops team can help with a huge variety of things: campaigns, strategy, reporting, data analytics.

It turns out, Kera was about to start working with a marketing ops team to help us transition from Mailchimp to Hubspot. 

I was floored. Couldn’t we just do that ourselves?? 

I come from a bootstrapped mentality which basically means: avoid spending money and learn any and all skills myself.

But there comes a point for every entrepreneur where it doesn’t make financial sense to do everything yourself. 

And I saw this first-hand recently through my work with Hustle Fund.

A few months ago, our team hired Fractional CMO. They specialize in supporting the systems and processes that enable the marketing team to perform optimally.

And oh boy, hiring them was the right choice. 

See, we knew it was time to move to a new marketing automation platform. This meant importing all our contacts, re-creating our email automation sequences, re-creating our templates, setting up deliverability processes… and so much more.

We had no previous experience with Hubspot. Learning the system and doing everything ourselves would have taken 4x as long as bringing in outside help. 

AND we would have made a ton of mistakes. 

This experience made me wonder: How do you know when it’s time to hire an agency vs. bring someone in-house? I talked to Shreyansh Surana, co-founder of Fractional CMO, to get his take. 

Pros of hiring a new team member

1. Industry knowledge: After you spend weeks (or months) onboarding a new marketing employee, that person will deeply understand your customers’ problems. Whereas an agency may be juggling multiple clients, and only have a high-level understanding of the work you do.
   
   
2. Speed: Having a dedicated full-time employee gives you better control of how fast you can move. They’re more adaptable to changes in projects when things inevitably shift and break. And they’re just a Slack message away.
   
   
3. Budget: It’s easier to manage costs for one person because they have a fixed salary. Working with an agency may require the effort of negotiating a fair hourly rate. Or the possibility of going over budget if the project takes more time than everyone anticipated. Or there might be fear of a huge invoice if the scoping was not done and communicated properly. 

Pros of working with an agency

Now that I’ve worked with a few agencies, I finally see the appeal of outsourcing some marketing projects. Here’s what Shreyansh says clients should look for in an agency (whether they’re working with Fractional CMO or someone else).

1. Tons of experience: A good agency has playbooks they’ve run with dozens of clients. For example, a client wanted to upgrade their Lead Scoring (aka: how you prioritize your leads for sales) as their customer journey matured, but didn’t know how to go about it. The Fractional CMO team quickly went through many scoring models they’d built across multiple clients, and recommended a few options. After some slight adaptations for this particular company, the client had a robust lead scoring… and didn’t spend months creating it.
   
   
2. They can handle a wider scope of projects: Digital ad operations, marketing automation, platform transitions… you name it. If you need someone to design a lead magnet or run an Instagram ad campaign, you don’t need to hire someone full-time. Agencies can serve as the generalists and specialists you need to get things done quickly instead of hiring more team members. Plus, you can end your contract with them once the project is done.
   
   
3. True problem solvers: Agencies come in for a clear purpose. They solve the mission and leave. They don’t set up basecamp. When startups are clear on the mission they need to achieve, agencies can feel like a magic bullet. 

Best stages to work with a team member or agency

If you’re super early, I recommend figuring things out yourself. Validate your idea. Write out your vision. Figure out your messaging. You’ll learn invaluable lessons by “doing things that don’t scale” to better understand your customers and the problem you’re trying to solve.

When you’re at the stage where you know what’s working and you need to do more of it, I like a combination of working with both team members and agencies.

Let’s take Kera as example. She runs our virtual events, produces Camp Hustle, writes a newsletter, and manages a team (among other things). So when it was time to transition to Hubspot, it was impossible to fit time into her schedule to learn a completely new platform and make this huge transition by herself. 

She knew that having a solid email marketing platform was worth the investment, but she needed help implementing.

There’s why we brought in Fractional CMO. They’ve done the transition from Mailchimp to Hubspot many times before. So they made a plan and coached Kera on how to be a Hubspot expert in a fraction of the time it would have taken her to do it on her own. 

So why do agencies get a bad rep?

Shreyansh told me agencies are often responsible for their own bad reputations. When agencies manage the number of clients they work with, they do amazing work. But when they’re oversubscribed with clients, the quality can go down. 

He recommends going to G2 or Clutch to read reviews from previous clients before hiring any agency. Be specific on the mission you want the agency to accomplish. Get clear on the project scope and costs. 

Agencies may not be ideal if you’re still at the idea stage. But it can be a great fit if you need a trusted partner to scale up your business.