A brief career guide for SaaS marketers

5 tactics to help you grow, build a reputation, and become the go-to person at work

In early 2013, a friend of mine was working on interviews of startup marketers for a blog post.

She mailed me a set of questions, and the last one made me laugh — she’d asked me what advice I would give to a young marketer. I replied saying that I was learning the ropes myself and that I had none to give, at least nothing that would qualify as advice.

Since then I have continued working at Freshworks, have had a successful stint at Wingify, and now lead marketing at Interview Mocha. Both Freshworks and Wingify are easily among the most successful companies in Indian SaaS. And I have learnt a little now, I guess, to give something that resembles advice, at least for marketers early to the industry and in their careers.

Being an early employee at a rocketship teaches you a lot of things very fast, and I’ve tried to distill the following from my successes and mistakes while working with some of the best minds in Indian SaaS.

Before we get into this, let me reassert that oft-repeated Sheryl Sandberg quote about not asking questions when being given a chance to join a rocketship. She was right. Nothing can accelerate your career like a great company can, especially if you are one of the first to get on board. I got lucky with Freshworks, but you can’t rely on luck alone. Some time spent on figuring out where exactly you want to work, and trying your best to get on board won’t be time wasted.

Having said that, all of us will not get that chance. The following checklist can help and give you some direction either way. I hope you get some value out of it.

Let’s dig in.

1. Demonstrate ability, put in the work

When you join a tech company or startup as a young person, you could be the odd one out. You could be the person who doesn’t understand the domain yet, the rookie who can be the butt of a joke or two. It can help to embrace this role for now, and put in the effort to learn as much as you can as fast as you can.

In my case, I walked into a team that was filled with experienced, hardened professionals, and though my first attempts to blend in were awkward and must have been painful to watch, I eventually won them over. The easiest way for you to do the same is to put your head down and demonstrate ability. Ship as fast as you can with as much quality as you can.

In our case as marketers, that could be decks, videos, copy, or blogs. Just ship stuff, and if you keep doing the work, people will notice.

In startup environments, your work will do the talking for you. In larger companies, a problem junior marketers face is not getting the big, important projects you need to get noticed. You still can: Don’t ask anyone, just produce the work, and show it. It may or may not be used at that point, but you have demonstrated ability, and the next time such a project comes up, you’ll be the one they tap.

2. Always do more than what is asked of you

Consider the following situation: Work for a sales deck is handed to you, and you’ve been asked to get it done in a few days, as it could be critical for a deal that is coming up. You know you can do this in a couple of days easy, but here’s what you should do: Run up to the sales team, try to understand more details about the deck from their perspective, ask for simulations when they might need it, what could be added to make it more contextual, and so on. Using that information, spend an extra day making that deck even more powerful. Even better, make a separate deck for that important, cool feature as a wow moment for the prospect (there always is one).

Now you’ve gone above and beyond what was asked of you and produced work so remarkable that the sales team will talk about it. And guess who they will ask for when they come back for some more help from your team? This will mean you have established credibility and reliability. Also, you have made your manager look good. Apply this same approach to whatever project is put in front of you, and it will be very difficult for you not to grow very fast.

3. Don’t be threatened by your company’s growth

Companies scale faster than people do. This means that if your organisation is doing well, people will be hired fast, organisational structures will change constantly, and this might lead to short-term uncertainty and ambiguity. The first thing to internalise here is that this is normal; this is what happens when companies grow fast, and is something you will have to get used to. Another thing you will have to get used to is that some of these folks will suddenly start to do stuff you were doing before, or might overlap into your role. This is okay — growing companies need more hands and more output. You can’t produce 10x of the work suddenly and single-handedly.

What you can do, however, is help the team with your knowledge and experience, things new folks won’t have. These inputs will be significant for new folks, and also position you as someone to go to for help. Figure out the niche which you can do better than everyone else, and try to add as much value as you can from that position.

More people coming in doesn’t mean that you are not valued, it just means that the company needs different things at this stage.

4. Over-communicate; and then do it again

As you grow in your role, rise in the company, and become a key player, organisations will also grow and become more complicated. As they do, there will be more layers between people, more mid-management, more bureaucracy. This means it will get tougher for information to pass through.

You have to counteract this with over communication, especially when it comes to your roles, responsibilities, and KRAs. Have repeated one on one meetings, ask for things in writing, make sure you understand clearly what is expected of you. Your manager has things to do, other people to manage. Don’t assume she knows what you are aiming for, or what your goals are, or which project you really, really want. Tell her, and tell her again. Then send her a mail. That promotion you think you should get, that other role you are going for, that raise you know you deserve, voice them as many times as you need to make it absolutely clear.

If you say it one too many times and get called out for it, that’s okay, but it’s a much bigger problem if your leaders don’t know or understand what you are thinking about.

5. Give the company, and your role, a little more time

Fast growing tech companies will give you constant, consistent periods of stress and confusion. These intervals of time will tempt you to make the jump to a place with more clarity, more opportunities, and perhaps less pressure.

This happens to all of us.

Here is where I’ll implore you to exercise your judgement. If you are really unnerved by the stress, and know that your mental health is at risk, then go ahead, make the jump. But for most of us, that’s not the case. We are just tired of bureaucracy, opportunities going to someone else, a dearth of clarity, and related frustrations.

But wait, give your organisation and your leaders some more time. Organisations take time to get these things right, and like us, they make some mistakes along the way. Give them the chance to try and make it right. Good organisations don’t want to lose good talent, and will try to make it up to you.

One way to figure out if you should give your organisation some time is to look at what their intent was in terms of decisions. If the intent is right, but the execution is wrong, stay. Give yourself some more time. If it is the other way around, then you know what to do.

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This was written as an email in November last year, for a friend who had joined Freshworks and had asked me how to think about work and his career. As I replied, I’d realised that this could be useful for more folks, and turned it into this essay.

Some of the above are deeply ingrained now in the way I think, mostly because at some point I have done the exact opposite. These are hard won lessons, and I wish someone had told me these things at the start of my career. It would have given me some sort of mental framework, a clear approach to work.

I hope it helps you.