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 

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

I have not met Bill Pearce, but I can tell I really like this guy.  More importantly, Del Monte is fortunate to have his thinking in the CMO chair.   His recent article in Ad Age, should be a hit with all CMO’s.  Not only does he talk about the value of marketing, he also talks about the important relationships with your CEO and CFO.  Managing these relationships and the expectations that come from them are critical to a CMO’s success.  

http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=137041

Far too many companies have cut bone in their marketing department, which has brought marketing activity to a grinding halt.  This has a double whammy effect as they will need to rebuild before they can recover.   Fortunately Bill is not alone and the best CMO’s are finding ways to provide value for the money entrusted to them and are therefore being allowed to move boldly ahead. 

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 

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

Client Side Best Practices – Adopt a Hiring Methodology

By Bob Van Rossum

In today’s increasingly competitive world, leaving mission critical positions open longer than absolutely necessary is unacceptable. The lost productivity and opportunity costs are staggering. Following are two practices you can implement to limit these costs by getting better talent into your organization more quickly.

1. Make sure you and your search firm adopt a hiring methodology and hiring focus, as opposed to having a perpetual search focus. It’s important to understand how your executive search process is impacted by you, your hiring methodology and your search firm. Unfortunately, having great candidates does not always result in making a great hire. The ability to take those candidates and move them through the hiring process quickly – from initial client interview, to follow up interviews, to offer – in a short window is very important not just to getting someone hired, but getting the right person hired. At MarketPro, we are known for getting a short list of candidates to our clients faster than anyone else in the industry. How do we do this? We have a team of experienced marketing professionals screening talent. Additionally, we benchmark every position at the start of the search process. This goes far beyond a typical search intake process conducted by most firms. In addition to the typical assignment study, and a position and candidate brief, we benchmark the position’s key deliverables necessary to move the company forward. Try this in your own company – develop functional, leadership, commitment and cultural benchmarks to maximize your success. Then, as we do, benchmark your candidates against these criteria and create a success profile. Only candidates for whom you can make a business case for clearing the mark move forward in the process. This is continually reevaluated as the process goes along and additional data is gathered.
2. Send a clear message to your top-level candidates that your organization is one that values talent. More and more in today’s marketplace, a passive candidate puts himself or herself out into the search process and begins to do some comparison shopping. With unemployment at an all time low, and with top quality talent getting harder to find, I would be disappointed if the top candidates were not smart enough to do this. If you conduct a slow interview process or are viewed as having a weak employment brand, you will continually find yourself losing top candidates to your competitors. If you want to successfully onboard your next top performer, send a powerful message during the interview process about how your company values talent. The good news is that it’s a very easy and powerful step to incorporate.

To illustrate my points, let’s look at two client examples from our experience at MarketPro.  Read More:

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