Why “One Hire = Growth” is a Dangerous Shortcut

By Kristin Oelke, Managing Director, Growth Services, Brightrose Ventures, and author of Trust: Unlocking B2B Growth in Today’s AI World

If you’ve ever thought: “We just need a marketer and everything will take off,” don’t worry - you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common myths we hear. And hey, we get it. Hiring one senior marketer feels like the logical next step.

But here’s the catch: HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report found that 63% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge, while 40% struggle to prove ROI.

Tackling just one of those challenges is a full-time job. Expecting a single hire to crack all of them? That’s a recipe for frustration (yours and theirs).

Modern GTM requires coordination across three engines:

• Demand Generation - fueling pipeline with campaigns that convert.

  
  

• Content - building trust and influence with sales-ready assets.

  
  

• Marketing Ops  - ensuring data and tech (like HubSpot) actually work.

  
  

One person can dabble in all three, but mastery? That takes a team. Otherwise, you end up with half-built campaigns, misfiring automations, and a lot of “we’ll get to that next quarter.”

The companies that thrive are the ones that treat marketing like a revenue engine, not a side gig. Deloitte research shows firms that align marketing tightly with sales grow revenue 19% faster than those that don’t. Alignment doesn’t happen when you put one exhausted marketer between two departments with competing demands.

Brightrose Growth Services gives small and mid-market B2B tech firms the team advantage-fractional, integrated experts who deliver demand gen, sales content, and HubSpot ops at the level that growth requires. Think of it as the cheat code to bypass the one-hire trap.