By Bob Van Rossum  

The average CMO tenure is 18 months and the responsibility of this is shared by company and candidate.  Ultimately neither side knows how to properly run the interview process.  Both sides end up making a decision from far too little data.  If you are interviewing for a CMO job and want to make sure you can succeed when you get there you need to prepare properly for the interview.  From the interview, the candidate needs to glean the corporation’s vision of marketing.  Does this vision actually match the expectations of the job you will do? 

Too often, corporations have lofty marketing goals, but are unwilling to give the CMO the latitude to create marketing programs that will make those goals possible.  Bottom line is to achieve success in today’s marketplace you must successfully differentiate your brand and products.  However most corporations take a risk adverse approach to marketing that leaves them with a lot of me too advertising, you can throw away remarkable amounts of money when your advertising looks like all your competitors.  You always have to protect your brand, but you can do that and still have great marketing.  Unfortunately it is rare a CEO knows enough about marketing to understand what differentiation is, let alone why it is important.  That is not to take anything away from a person who is probably extremely qualified to be the CEO, most CEO’s simply have not spent any significant time during their careers in a marketing role.  So they manage the CMO the same way they manage the CFO and it quickly becomes a disaster. 

As a candidate for a CMO gig, you need to ask some vital questions?  Some of which will seem very basic, but are overlooked most of the time:

1.       How do you plan to define success for the new CMO in the first 12 months and the first 3 years? 

2.       Does [COMPANY NAME] have a marketing strategy to differentiate itself from the competition or are you looking for the CMO to create such a strategy?

3.       How does the company’s culture impact its marketing?

4.       How would you grade the company’s marketing over the past year?

5.       How has marketing impacted the company’s bottom line over the past couple of years?

Properly hiring a CMO is the most important and challenging task any organization has.  Unfortunately the CMO candidate often fails before they ever started because they did not find out enough about the opportunity before accepting.  CMO will have big deliverables, which can be obtained if they hire the best possible candidate and give him/her the enough latitude to truly differentiate.  Too often new CMO’s are expected to do great things while only painting inside the lines.    

Recommended CMO Reading:

1. Eating the Big Fish
2. The Speed of Trust
3. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

www.marketproinc.com

By Bob Van Rossum 

Gone are the days when throngs of salesmen in penny loafers knocked on businesses’ doors one by one in hopes of introducing, educating, and converting those “blind” prospects into long-term customers. Thirty years ago, there were only a handful of ways prospects could get information from anyone other than your sales force. Now, your marketing department has assumed the role of educating your customers, and your sales team’s role has shrunk to simply converting interested and educated prospects into buyers. Plain and simple, marketing has trumped sales in the corporate hierarchy.

Marketing today is a complicated game. Back in the 1970’s, your company might have spent almost its entire marketing budget on television commercials to run during I Love Lucy, or bought up a bunch of newspaper ads or radio spots. These choices alone would allow you to reach your target audience. Not anymore. Focusing your marketing efforts with laser accuracy has replaced broadcasting. Now your marketing department needs to know where and how they can reach your targeted demographic.

Read more: http://www.marketproinc.com/success/why_marketing.html

By Bob Van Rossum 

Marketing has never been more important than it is today.  In fact, marketing is now even more important than sales.  

However, many companies have a difficult time finding and keeping the best possible CMO.

Let’s look at a few of the core reasons why the average CMO only lasts 18 months.

First, even though several members of a company’s executive team will interview a potential CMO, typically, none of them truly understand marketing.  This makes them uniquely unqualified for the task. 

Marketing is, to say the least, unique. It’s not like finance, IT or operations and asking similar interview questions when recruiting a CFO, CIO or COO will make hiring a CMO a gamble at best. 

Without the knowledge to make an informed decision, even the best interview process offers no real value to you. 

Few CEOs understand marketing and how it can benefit their organization.  They understand why marketing benefits them, but not how and this makes them ineffective interviewers for the CMO role. 

As someone who has placed many CMOs, and all of the ones we have placed in the last 3 plus years are still are still in place, I am constantly dumbfounded by the interview questions candidates get when interviewing for a CMO role. 

The CMO role is strategic, but the questions CMO candidates are typically asked are usually tactical and often more appropriate for someone interviewing for a manager level role.  Asking the wrong questions, not only gets you inadequate data to make a decision, but also turns off the most talented candidates.   

By the same token, most CMO candidates who have achieved enough success in their career to be a viable CMO candidate, do not routinely understand which CMO roles they can excel in and which ones are best left to someone with different experience. 

Hence they customarily do not ask the right questions, assuming their past success can be replicated in any CMO role.  Ultimately that is not the case for even the brightest mind with the incorrect career foundation.

As an example, the first question candidates usually ask is about budget. This question is irrelevant and it sends the wrong message to the employer.  Successful candidates need to know how to differentiate this company from its competitors..   

Legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only these two basic functions: marketing and innovation.  Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.  Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” 

So, when both sides of the interview process enter it with gaps in knowledge, how do you overcome this problem and hire successfully? 

Referencing Drucker’s statement , you must first acknowledge you are talking about the most important position in the company. 

Second, from the company perspective, you want to stop seeing marketing as an expense and view it as the most strategic part or your organization.  Then develop a performance-based job profile, not a job description.  Using this profile, develop the qualifications you need in a candidate and then craft interview questions to determine if someone has already been successful doing these things. 

We are not looking for someone who can do the job, we are looking for someone who has already done it. 

Third, if you are a CMO candidate get real about your background, skills and abilities.  If you go for the job because it has a big title and it’s a new challenge, don’t be surprised to find you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. 

Marketing does not mean the same thing to all organizations and how they achieve differentiation varies greatly. 

 www.marketproinc.com

By Bob Van Rossum

Epsilon recently surveyed CMO’s and realized they were having a hard time finding talent for today’s evolving world of marketing.

http://www.epsilon.com/modules/Press-Releases-012909-Profile-of-an-American-CMO/p83-l3

http://www.marketingcharts.com/topics/nearly-40-of-cmos-unhappy-with-new-hire-talent-pool-7897/?utm_campaign=rssfeed&utm_source=mc&utm_medium=textlink

The results suggest that there is less talent or inadequate talent in the marketplace.

But nothing could be further from the truth. 

In any economy the best talent is hard to find, because businesses don’t lay off top performers. 

The problem leading brands have is:

1.      Lack of an employment brand

2.      Lack of talent reach or an inability to identify the top talent

3.      Lack of talent access or an inability to create interest from top talent in their company and / or opportunity.

Ultimately recruiting marketing talent is not like recruiting for finance or IT, the recruiter cannot use certifications to determine who is truly talented.  If a skilled recruiter who normally does not look for marketing talent calls a rockstar candidate on your behalf does not truly understand marketing you have zero chance of convincing an A player to come join your team.  Not only do they pass on joining today, they will remember the interaction the next time a marketing recruiter calls, making it more difficult in the future.  Unfortunately in most recruiting processes, not only is there a lack an understanding of marketing, they lack the time to proactively reach out to the top talent and do not understand where to find them.  Real problem for the CMO is convincing others in the organization that recruiting marketing talent is fundamentally different from recruiting other functions.  The talent is out there you just need to know where to find them and how to convince them making a move is in their best interest. 

www.marketproinc.com

It would seem that as professionals become more advanced in their careers, making transitions should get easier. In reality, the higher someone goes in an organization, the more challenging career transitions become. The expression, “It’s lonely at the top” is resoundingly true. There are fewer people at top levels of an organization who can serve as mentors, and who are capable of or have time to answer the questions of their aspiring peers. Also, candidates looking for change are established and set in their ways, and while they have plenty of experience to make judgments, that experience may or may not be a fit for another company’s culture and expectations.

As an employer, you have an entirely different perspective. You expect senior marketing executives to hit the ground running based on the investment you are making in them – as you should, but the more senior a candidate will be in your organization, the more important and challenging onboarding a new hire becomes.

So the stakes and challenges are high – but different – for both you and your potential new employee. This white paper explains how through a solid onboarding approach, both sets of challenges can be conquered. It explains how they must be overcome to maintain organizational stability in today’s global business environment.

Onboarding is a shared responsibility between your company and the newly hired marketing executive.

Read More

http://www.marketproinc.com/success/successful_marketing_executive_onboarding.html