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 

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

By Bob Van Rossum

Interesting times we are living in, looks like many people are being lulled into a false sense of insecurity.  A belief they can wait until the market turns before they need to take action.  The market is creating a situation where good business people are pretending they do not know how to run their business because they are unable to grasp what to do next.  While others are seeing it clearly and using this as an opportunity to hire the best marketing talent and they are doing so with alarming speed.   We lost a top executive level marketing candidate today as our client has been slow to make a commitment, the second such top candidate we have lost on this search alone. 

But this search is not unique, our clients who are succeeding are the ones moving fast and our clients who are acting like a deer in the headlights, well they are slowing down their search as I will only let them hire an “A” player.  The myth is that there are a lot of talented people in the marketplace.  Reality is there are very talented people looking for a job, but the other reality is companies by and large did not cut their top people, they cut the bottom ten percent.  So you have a dynamic where the marketplace has lots of unemployed people and around 10% – 15% are worth hiring.  For the placements we have made in the last six months, over 82% of candidates hired had a job at the time we found them a new one.  In my decade as a recruiter, I have never seen a better time to add talented marketers to your team and never has it been harder to separate “A” level talent from everybody else.  Our business is growing as companies are realizing the need for an experienced marketing professional to recruit and screen marketing talent, as those looking for a job have become talented at interviewing. 

The most important aspect of what is going on in the market is the work and results being driven by these new marketers.  Our clients have seen themselves leapfrogging their competition with regards to brand awareness and revenue.     

http://www.marketproinc.com

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