How to compensate your startup's marketing team

Pay-for-performance for marketing is the wrong frame at an early startup, because you rarely have clean attribution, tracing which marketing touch produced a given sale, to reward against. Etgar Shpivak, who works with seed and Series A founders, ties the variable pay to a revenue number marketing shares with sales, so the reward rests on a result both teams can see instead of a lead nobody can cleanly assign.

A double quota is a single revenue target that marketing and sales are both measured and paid against, instead of each team carrying its own number. Maya Szutan Azoulay described it on Founders' Marketing Compass as compensating both teams when the shared number lands, which takes the friction over who sourced a given lead off the table.

The variable share of a marketing team's pay should track how proven marketing's contribution is, instead of a fixed formula copied from sales. Maya Szutan Azoulay framed it as how critical marketing is to the business. Etgar Shpivak's read is to move marketing toward parity with other teams only once its case is visible, and to keep more of the pay in base until then.

Marketing compensation shifts with stage, but the bigger lever is how proven marketing's contribution is by the time you set it. Maya Szutan Azoulay said that when a company cannot operate without its marketing team, that team is paid close to any other, while at the earliest stage, before the case is made, more of the pay sits in base and less in upside.

At seed, marketing running past about 20% of the company budget is a red flag, in Maya Szutan Azoulay's view, because early demand should still be low-friction and largely founder-led. That figure is a starting caution, not a hard rule. The fuller question of how much a startup should spend on marketing depends on stage and business type.

A founder stays close to marketing even after hiring a leader for it, because the brand and the company's face are things only the founder can fully own. Asked by Etgar Shpivak what founders get wrong, Maya Szutan Azoulay said marketing is not something you can distance yourself from, and to expect the work to take more of your calendar, not less. The same pull shapes whether the founder should be the public face of the company.

Because marketing attribution barely holds together at an early startup, and when tracing fails, a bonus paid on lead count rewards volume the company may never bank. It also sets marketing and sales against each other every quarter, arguing over whose work closed the deal. The pay plan turns that argument into money.

One number both teams carry changes what each side optimizes for. Neither can win by pushing its own metric while the other misses. The fight over who brought the lead loses its point, because the credit no longer decides anyone's bonus. Marketing's pay and sales' pay rise and fall together.

An early-stage startup usually starts with a consultant or fractional marketing leader, then brings in a full-time CMO once the sales motion is proven and it can fund a team. Maya Szutan Azoulay favors the lighter arrangement early, since a wrong senior hire is a long, costly mistake to unwind. Etgar Shpivak, a marketing consultant, works directly with seed and Series A founders while they settle which number marketing owns, described on his bio page.

So you can see what the spend on marketing actually returns. When the leader's salary sits inside the marketing budget, it is easier to judge the function against the result it brings. That is Maya Szutan Azoulay's approach, alongside a simple test for how much to pay: how critical marketing is to the business and how proven its case is.

When there is no real sales quota to share yet. At pre-seed or early seed, the company is often still educating a market with no repeatable sales motion, and attribution barely exists. Forcing a double quota that early invents a metric instead of measuring one. Keep the pay simple until there's a real sales number to share.