Effective marketing is one of the most vital components to getting a startup off the ground. The problem, however, is that most venture-based startups don’t really have the capital to put a seasoned marketing executive in place. Instead, Venture Capitalist-backed startups typically bring in someone with often significantly less experience – and more fiscally palatable salary demands, of course – and throw them directly into the fire.

More often than not,  junior-level professionals simply  can’t develop the   marketing strategy needed for a significant start-up to be successful.   The practical ideas they generate are often very good, but less effective without the benefit of an senior-level perspective for the marketing direction of the company.

So how does a start-up get past these hurdles? Outsourcing the work to agencies or an independent consultant are often more costly than hiring a full-time executive. A much better option is to bring in someone on an interim basis, typically six to nine months, to work with the company’s chief officers in drafting a comprehensive marketing strategy. You get the benefit of having an experienced professional on your team at a crucial time in the company’s development without having to swallow the steep salary that an individual of that caliber would demand over the long haul.

It’s the same general principle as bringing in an experienced software architect at the beginning to help design the entire system. Once everything is in place, you have the flexibility to bring in lower-level employees to implement the ideas. Software development companies don’t have to pay coders anywhere near what they would have to shell out to keep a high-level software architect on the payroll. Marketing is no different. The junior-level employees have an important role to fill, but they are much more valuable to a startup because of their ability to put a plan into action.

About MarketPro:

MarketPro is the leading interim marketing executive and marketing executive search firm in the USA.  Whether your need is interim / contract or direct placement, we provide top companies with talent that exceeds expectations both functionally and culturally.  Our recruiters know the best marketing talent, because they are experienced marketers.  MarketPro places talent in all marketing related disciplines and does so in less time with a higher success ratio than anyone else in the industry.

Marketing Sherpa recently conducted a survey of 1700 BtoB marketers to discover their specific blocks to success. What was their number one obstacle?  62% of all marketers surveyed identify lack of resources in staffing, budgeting or time as the greatest barrier to their marketing success.

The historical solution to that age-old problem was to hire a consultant. But put the word “consultant” at the end of anything, and it quickly gets expensive. Yet on-demand marketing expertise is exactly what Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies need in order to set the pace in today’s ever-changing marketplace. How do the successful ones do it with today’s restricted budgets?  They do it on their own terms – with Interim Marketing Executives.

Companies outsource manufacturing and tech support to work faster, better, cheaper. Finance departments have used interim executives for years. Entire R&D efforts are purchased as companies identify new markets. Ad hoc marketing expertise is  now essential is all competitive business models – Interim Marketing Executives are moving in for brief periods of time, and getting results for  smart companies.

An Interim Marketing Executive is a highly skilled, independent mid- to executive-level professional, hired as needed to quickly integrate into a company and perform a specific task, project, or transition. They are especially effective when a new and impartial perspective is desired, marketing strategy is to be developed or revamped, or when a specific skill set is needed only for  a few months, or years.

In light of this creative solution, smart companies have found a way to take advantage of new, competitive landscapes they would not have been able to in years past.

For example, MarketPro, a national placement firm, helped a multi-billion dollar publicly-held company accomplish just this task. By hiring just one of MarketPro’s Interim Marketing Executives, they were able to launch one of its most successful brands in China. Directly following the strategic development and launch of the brand, MarketPro’s Interim Marketing Executive quickly and seamlessly transferred this strategy and knowledge to the existing staff. The value of the Interim Executive’s service to the long-term business sustainability is unquantifiable in its magnitude.

A nimble workforce has been the goal for a decade. All decision makers have visions of highly qualified personnel switching gears on a moment’s notice and redirecting efforts to new projects seamlessly. What is just now being understood, however, is that these changes need to happen from the top down, and realistically, the best way to achieve this level of flexibility is with interim partners, perfectly paired to a businesses’ needs, and with an unrivaled depth of expertise.

Interim Marketing Executives are the way for businesses  to get the talent they need when they need it, and at a price far more competitive than consulting firms. Free of internal politics, Interim Marketing Executives are utilizing their proven abilities to take savvy companies to the forefront of a new competitive edge.

About MarketPro:

MarketPro is the leading interim marketing executive and marketing executive search firm in the USA.  Whether your need is interim / contract or direct placement, we provide top companies with talent that exceeds expectations both functionally and culturally.  Our recruiters know the best marketing talent, because they are experienced marketers.  MarketPro places talent in all marketing related disciplines and does so in less time with a higher success ratio than anyone else in the industry.

By Bob Van Rossum

Calling it win-win makes this a cliché and while I hate using cliché’s, unfortunately this is the best description.  Too often in the process, both sides get too focused on themselves and as a result too rigid.  A great deal for company and candidate can easily fall apart by focusing on things that are of little importance. 

If the hiring company gives a little is that better than going to the candidate who is second best?

If the candidate gives a little is that better than staying in a job that has no opportunities for career advancement?

Candidate

For the candidate it is important to remember that you only want to negotiate “go” or “no go” items.  Too often candidates confuse questions with negotiation points.  For example, healthcare is not a negotiable item, so you only need that information to help you make a great decision.  Ask for benefits related information in a separate conversation from you salary negotiation.  Keep the salary negotiation focused and simple. 

Company

Take a second to realize that while this is just business for you, it is very personal for the candidate.  You are working to fit the best candidate into you salary range and have internal equity, the candidate really wants to feed their kids.

By Bob Van Rossum

For longer than I have been in the business, candidates have tried to adjust momentum in their favor by creating deadlines for the company doing the hiring.  This is done by making up another offer and telling the recruiter you have an offer when in reality you do not.

Ultimately I have rarely seen this work out well for the candidate and most of the time it backfires.  Companies have a hiring process that they go through because it has proven successful for them in the past.  Asking them to shorten (disrupt) this process makes them uneasy, there is no good reason to do this unless it is absolutely necessary.

After the deadline has passed, it is amazing how often this other offer did not materialize and they are still interested in my client.  Unfortunately the candidate with the faux offer has now lost tremendous credibility.

What we recommend is transparency.  If you really have a competing offer, or are expecting one, share everything you know about it with the recruiter.  Then we can manage our client accordingly and if you are truly very talented it is likely we can get them to make a decision more quickly than they wanted to.  However there is risk they will not adjust the timing of the deal, risk you have no reason to absorb if you are not forced to do so.

 By Bob Van Rossum

After you know How to Prepare for an Interview you can learn some specifics about the phone interview. 

The phone interview is inherently challenging as you lose the non-verbal feedback you receive in a face-to-face interview.  Ultimately this leads to some common mistakes.  

Phone interview Do’s and Don’ts:

1. Do NOT under any circumstances have the pages of notes you have created about your career in front of you when you interview.  You do not want to use the notes as a crutch, you do not want to be fumbling through paper looking for an answer and most of all you do not want to sound like you are reading the answer.
2. Be in a quiet place where you can focus on nothing but the interview.  Door closed.
3. Do not be doing anything else, watching the news, sending an instant message, checking e-mail.  The interviewer deserves your undivided attention.  Television off, computer off, cell phone off.
4. Make the call from a land line.  Nothing ruins a phone interview faster than a dropped cell phone call. 
5. Be formal, interviews are naturally a formal process.  You need to be at least as formal on the phone as you would be in person.  Leave the sarcasm and wit for after you already have the job.
6. Do not feel the need to fill up every moment of silence with the sound of your voice.  Answer the question, fully and completely, demonstrating results / achievements and be quiet.  The interviewer is now deciding which question to ask you next, a common mistake at this moment is to get nervous due to the silence and spend the next 30 minutes giving the interviewer a running commentary on your life since age 2.  I have never seen this work very well, I have seen candidates do this after I have warned them not to. 
7. Do have 4 or 5 questions prepared for the end of the interview.  You should have approximately 3 questions prepared related to the company and the job. 
8. Most importantly, close the interview showing you are results oriented, you are interested in the job and ask for the next step.  While you are at it, go ahead and learn what the real job description is:

Phone interview Final Questions: (Separate yourself from the others)

The final two questions I want you to ask after you come up with two or three of your own.  The 2 or 3 of your own will be around the job / company / opportunity.  These are the standard questions about products, job, scope of responsibility, etc. 

The final two questions are important, just like an in person interview, people will remember the beginning and the end.  Your goal at this point in time is to be invited in for an in person interview.  Do not put the cart before the horse and ask for the job, they do not have enough data on you to award it yet. 

The last question you want to ask the interviewer will vary based on who you are interviewing with hiring manager or human resources. 

Time is precious in the interview and asking the right questions is as important if not more important than answering questions well.  Assume you are competing against other talented professionals and everyone will have strong answers for the interviewer, so far you are only equal to the others.  Now is an opportunity to separate you from the pack.  You will not receive the same amount of time to ask questions that the interviewer will so let’s make sure the questions you do ask really count.  

Hiring Manager:

Second to last question – [FIRST NAME], I really appreciate your time today.  The [INSERT JOB TITLE HERE] role is one I am very excited about, it is a great next step for my career.  I believe I can really come in and add value to the role and the team.  Let’s look out 12 to 18 months and assume I have been able to exceed ALL your expectations.  What have we accomplished and how is the company better off for the effort?

That is a long question but as I said, you do not have much time to communicate your questions.  With this question, you have actually accomplished 4 very important things.

1. You have shown interest in the specific role, the importance of this cannot be overstated.
2. You have shown you are team oriented.
3. You have shown you are results focused.
4. Most importantly if you listen carefully you are about to understand:
   1. The real job description
   2. How to be successful in your first 12 months.

The real job description is something you need to uncover in the interview process.  Chances are the written one was created five years ago by someone other than the hiring manager.  Uncovering the true needs of the position is going to help you prepare for your in-person interview. 

The first year on any job is your most critical time.  Of the people who do not succeed, sometimes it is truly a lack of ability.  Most often it is a misalignment of hiring manager’s expectations with what the new employee sees as important.  New employee is using the job description the hiring manager received from HR and never actually read.

Last question – [FIRST NAME], this sounds like a great time to be joining [COMPANY NAME].  I am impressed with where the company is going and what I have learned about the team.  Do you have any concerns about moving me forward to the next step in the interview process?

With this question you have accomplished three critical items.

1. You have shown interest in the company.  This is equally and important as showing interest in the job and almost always over looked.
2. You have opened a window for them to express any concerns / objections they might have and therefore an opportunity for you to overcome them.  Many times a simple miscommunication derails an interview process.  If they have already decided to take you to the next step or to eliminate you from the process they will not mention anything.  If they are unsure of their decision they will share a concern with you.
3. Psychologically it is harder to say no to someone who asks to go to the next step than it is to say no to someone who does not.

By Bob Van Rossum

The most important thing to remember when preparing for an interview is:  The Company is NOT hiring you, they are hiring what you can DO for them.  The second thing to remember is interview performance is not indicative of job performance, which means the best candidate does not get the job, the candidate who interviews the best does.   An interview is an opportunity and when opportunity meets preparation you get success. 

The key to success in any interview is professional self awareness. 

If you have ever left an interview and thought of a better answer to one of the questions on the way home in your car, you were not appropriately prepared when you walked in.

Ultimately we want to avoid this scenario.  I get a call from the candidate after they leave my clients office after running through 4 or 5 interviews with various members of the team. As I pick up the phone, I am immediately struck by their enthusiasm.   “Bob, thank you for sending me in to this interview, this is a perfect next step for me in my career.  This opportunity has everything I am looking for.  The company is growing, the hiring manager is someone I can learn from.  I will have the opportunity to really create something.”  To which I say, “Great, tell me about how the interviews went.”  Oh everything went fantastic, I really felt strong I answered all the questions really well, there was this one question I did not answer very well, probably not a big deal, but if I just had more time to think about it, I would have had a great answer for them.  As soon as I got to my car I remembered the perfect example to share with them.    Should I mention something about it in my thank you note?  To which, I already know that the thank you note is now completely irrelevant. 

If you spent 2 hours learning about the company, you need to spend 8 hours relearning yourself.  If you have been in the real world for more than 100 days, you have accomplished many things and forgotten most of them.  Trying to remember them on the spot in the middle of an interview is an incredibly bad idea.  It only takes one bad answer to ruin your chances at the job of your dreams. 

I want you to sit down in quiet place and hand write out everything significant or interesting you have done in your career.  You need to hand write it as most of us are more creative when writing by hand versus typing.  You are going to break your background into 3 separate areas, first functional, second is leadership and third is culture.  I want you to take time to go through every role you have ever worked in, this could be multiple roles within the same organization and answer some very important questions. 

In regard to your specific job / function:

1. What was it like to work at the company during this time?
2. What were our challenges?
3. What were my individual goals?
4. Most importantly what were the quantifiable results achieved.  What would I define as my biggest accomplishments?
5. Why those results were important to the company.

In regard to your leadership ability: (if you have not had management responsibilities, you can skip this)

1. What is my leadership style?  Why?
2. Number of direct reports in each of your previous roles and total # on your team.
3. Top hiring success?
4. Example of a time I turned a mediocre performer into a top performer?
5. How do you motivate your team?
6. Most difficult management decision?

With regard to culture:

1. What was the culture of the organization?
2. Did the culture help or hinder success?
3. What would I have changed about the culture if I was empowered to do so?

After you go through all this one time this will become a working document.  You will add notes in the margin as you think of them.  You want to review your notes in detail 3 or 4 times prior to your interview.  Leave the notes at home, you do not want anyone you are interviewing with to see it.  If this is a phone interview DO NOT have the notes in front of you while you are on the phone.  It is not appropriate to be fumbling through your notes looking for answers, nor do you want to sound like you are reading your answers. 

The ultimate purpose of doing this is threefold:

1. To bring all your significant accomplishments to the top of your mind where you can easily access them.  You are now prepared to answer any question they ask because you know yourself.   You can easily access your best answer every time.
2. To increase your confidence in the interview.
3. You will have such ready access to the best answer you will actually be able to determine in the interview if this is really a place you want to work. 

Preparing this way will make every answer you give incrementally better, when you add all those increments up it makes a huge big difference in setting you apart from your competition.

Also check out The Phone Interview.

By Bob Van Rossum 

The CMO role is changing more rapidly than any other “C” suite position.  CMO’s and the COO’s or CEO’s who manage them are scrambling to keep up.  While CMO’s used to be able to get away with understanding brand and advertising, this is no longer enough.  Any CMO with this selective toolbox is only going to provide a very limiting solution to their employer.  Hiring a CMO with this limited view of marketing is one of the reasons the average CMO tenure is 18 months.

Today’s CMO needs to understand how the business works.  This seems obvious, but too often marketing is relegated to the “make things pretty department”.  Only a CMO who understands the business deserves a seat at the big table.  If you are savvy enough to drive corporate strategy then you have the insight necessary to be a great CMO.

Analytics will drive your decisions.  Historically the most persuasive person on the marketing team was the one who was able to get ideas started and implemented.  Today, it all starts with customer data and dispassionate analysis.  We are seeing a trend of top analytics executives being promoted to CMO.  I expect the pace of that trend to accelerate. 

The CMO job is getting more difficult by the day.  New pressures include the evolving media landscape, economic uncertainty and responsibility for corporate strategy.  Continually we are in a period where more is expected with less. 

In addition to all the traditional responsibilities (branding, direct marketing, market research, etc.) we place on the CMO’s plate.  In order to keep their jobs, CMO’s need:

• Innovation – Both in products and how they market them. 
• Revenue Growth – Sales team is execution, marketing owns the sales strategy.
• Alignment – Cross-functional, global, executive team all need to be aligned with customer.
• Accountability – Both in investment and a focus on constant improvement
• Strategy – Top level CMO’s are driving corporate strategy, marketing strategy and sales strategy using customer centric data.

The result is when done correctly, the CMO is the second most powerful role in the organization.  In the future we will commonly see CMO’s promoted to CEO.

Researchers Also Develop Framework for Classifying Variances in Marketing Leadership Positions Across Companies and Industries Based on Scientific Analysis of Job Descriptions

Atlanta (PRWEB) November 18, 2009 — New research appears to indicate that, despite the volatility that sometimes surrounds the position, the role of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is being created with increasing frequency among publicly-held companies. This finding is the result of two studies conducted by Rajdeep Grewal, Professor of Marketing and Dean’s Faculty Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University, and Rui Wang, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Peking University, Beijing, China. The results are published in the current volume of The Chief Marketing Officer Journal (www.ChiefMarketingOfficer.com).

The purpose of the research effort was to answer several questions about the role of heads of marketing, such as: Are all CMOs created equal?; Are there any systematic differences in the job descriptions of CMOs versus those of a vice president (VP) of marketing in firms without the CMO position?; What are the ramifications of any such differences in the role and expectations of CMOs and VPs of marketing for firms and the heads of marketing?; Is the “Chief Marketing Officer” title just glorified nomenclature for the VP Marketing?

Read more: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/11/prweb3218374.htm

By Bob Van Rossum 

We all know that a top performer is ten times more productive than an average performer and they only earn about ten percent more.  The bottom line impact of having an “A” player on your team is enormous.  Ultimately, Corporate America is interesting in the fact that due to pay grades and internal equity, rock stars get paid about the same as the kid in the high school band.  No one needs to be reminded of the cold, hard truth that your job rides on the quality of the talent you are surrounded by. That in mind, who do you want to go to battle with everyday?  Bono or the pimply faced kid playing the trombone? 

As organizations have reduced headcount overall and eliminated the fat they have become laser focused on cost in ways that are counterproductive.  You cut the bottom ten percent of your workforce because expenses were out of line with revenues.  Now it is time to make some strategic investments in talent and your process for doing so is to hope you find an “A” player who fell into another corporation’s bottom ten percent?  If so, you are asking for an underperforming professional and to have to do the search over again in twelve to eighteen months.  It is true that there are some very talented people in today’s job market.  However they are clearly the exception rather than the rule.  If you look at the placements our firm has made over the past 18 months, 84% of the candidates we have presented to our clients have been in a position or employed at the time we submitted them for consideration.  These passive candidates resulted in 93% of our placements.  Interesting that at a time when unemployment is around 9%, our clients are overwhelmingly convinced the best talent is not out looking.  When compared side-by-side, you are able to see their simply is no comparison.   

Today it is more important than ever to have quality people in your organization.  Simple math really, you have fewer people doing more work.  With an increased importance being placed on marketing, nowhere is this more important than in the group responsible for differentiating you from your competitors.  Peter Drucker says, “All business in marketing and innovation, everything else is just an expense.”

Business is harder than ever, we are still in a recession and not sure what the new “normal” is.  Globalization puts constant pricing pressure on companies who do not have that level of competition built into their cultures.  If you hope to compete and win, it is vital that you have the best possible people on in your organization.  Yet the strategy many executives carry to their HR organization is DO NOT spend any money on search fees.  Even worse, they tie the bonus of the HR executive to how little they spend on search fees.  How about we tie the bonus of the HR executive to the quality of hire?  If you send your hiring manager enough average candidates, sooner or later they will find a bad excuse to hire one of them to the detriment of your bottom line.   

I believe that eighty percent of organizations have quality people working in HR and recruiting.  Problem is based on who they are, they cannot effectively research, target, contact and most importantly convince passive candidates to join your team.  RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) companies have not improved upon this they have just shifted an identical process to outside your company.  You get prettier reports, but not better talent.  The only tried and true method for attracting the best passive candidates to your team is to call an executive search firm.  Most importantly pick one who is at the top of their specialty.  The best search firms know they cannot be all things to all people and can move exponentially faster when they niche focused.     

Not everyone in the executive search business is an “A” player their respective niche.  The best ones hire people with domain expertise in the area of specialty and train them to be top recruiting professionals.  For example, you cannot recruit a top marketing professional if you have never worked in a marketing role.  Globally, the recession will end soon enough.  Your company’s ability to come out of its own doldrums and grow again is 100% dependent on the quality of your team.  Are you surrounded by rock stars motivated to do great things or kids from the high school band just looking to get by?  The deck is stacked against you if you are looking to hire another organization’s castoffs.

By Bob Van Rossum 

In Part One we discussed from a basic perspective why it is so difficult for a CMO to drive success.  Now we need to go farther into the challenges all CMO’s and those who hire them face.  Some suggest that the average CMO tenure is closer to 24 or 28 months, in reality they are measuring too small a universe of companies.  CMO tenure is a problem that only gets worse as company size decreases.  Smaller organizations need marketing now more than ever, however they tend to have less of an ability to measure the ROI their marketing programs bring.  As a result they tend to jump from one program to the next with no strategic marketing plan.    

The CMO Dilemma:  CMO’s face a common dilemma, do you focus on long-term innovation and maybe miss short-term goals or do you focus on the next ninety days and ultimately get passed by more aggressive competition?  One thing is for sure, organizations with the best financial results have CMO’s who have been around a while and have a real seat at the table in the C-Suite. 

How to recruit a new CMO:  The biggest challenge in finding a new CMO is not all CMO jobs are similar.  Unlike the CIO or CFO role, the CMO job actually can have more differences than similarities.  We have identified 5 distinctly different CMO gigs, which means depending on who you hire if you are not aware of what type of marketing organization your company has your chance of success is 20%.  Ultimately, not only do you need to identify what type of marketing organization you have, you need to recognize what kind of talent you have reporting to your CMO. The functional expertise of your existing marketing team will also change the type of expertise you need the CMO to have.  Bringing in a new CMO is a huge opportunity, not just to bring in better talent, but to re-define what marketing needs to do for your company.  Last thing in the world you want to do is bring in a new CMO and ask them to continue with the status quo that led to last person to leave in the first place.  

One of our competitors has published a whitepaper on The Successful CMO.  Ultimately the whitepaper leads companies down a path that will set the new CMO up to fail.  In part of the whitepaper, they outline a CMO’s range of responsibilities and the reality is no one has a career with enough breadth of experience for them to come close to checking all those boxes.   You get to be a senior marketer by being an expert in one area first and becoming a generalist later.  This means there are one or two things you do extremely well, a bunch of things you are good at and a few things you have never seen before.  Question is does your expertise as a marketer line up with the type of marketing organization you are walking into?  If not, even the brightest mind will fail as the CMO gig does not offer on-the-job training. 

Ultimately if you are inviting someone into the C-Suite, make it a big gig and hire someone who can exceed all expectations.  If you only want advertising and marketing communications, then an SVP of Marketing will suffice.  You will get passed by your competitors who truly understand the CMO is becoming more valuable everyday and the value they provide includes understanding consumer (or business) demand, product development, achieving top line growth and delivering on margin goals. 

www.marketproinc.com