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

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

Showing interest and being committed are integral to interview success.  This young man impressed after he made it to the interview with a stab wound in his leg.  While I would not recommend trying to repeat his feat on the way to your next interview, ask yourself how committed you are to getting this job and what have you done to make sure you are prepared to win.

Teen stabbed in leg, but makes it to job interview, then hospital – Welland Tribune – Ontario, CA

http://www.wellandtribune.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1422078

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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

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

Wow, information is accumulating at an amazing rate.  With great opportunities that exist with LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook and all the strong individual blogs out there, how can you possibly get hold of the best information and be able to utilize to allow you company to make more money.  Yes, all this social networking is great, but at the end of the day we still have a responsibility to our shareholders.  How do you define if the time you spend in the wonderful world of Web 2.0 is productive or not.  Quite simply, if what you are doing is making you more money than it is a good use of time and if you cannot quantify the value of it then you need to spend your time on something that has impact on profit.  The simple question to ask is:  Did my time help me acquire a customer, grow my relationship with a customer or reduce my cost?  If you cannot answer yes to at least one of these questions, move on to something that does.    

Please do not get me wrong, in the fast food world we live in I certainly understand and subscribe to the importance of blogging, article marketing, etc. and the time investment that this takes.  Ultimately you need to understand intrinsic value of your online presence and how it will impact your business over time.   You also need to understand what others are doing online and make a place for those ideas in your execution of an online marketing program.  But I also know how easily you can get caught in the massive amount of information that is coming at you on a daily basis and lose sight of what is you end goal, money. 

In addition to constantly asking the three questions outlined above, I recommend the following actions:

1.       Stop letting your inbox run your day.  On the average day I receive 200 e-mails that require my attention.  It is easy to become tied to my inbox, but this does not maximize my productivity and profit.  It is easy for me to go to Outlook to look for a piece of information to complete a task and on my way to that data I see I have a new message and get sidetracked from the reason I went to Outlook in the first place.  I have now set limits on when I will check my e-mail.

2.       Organize the information overflow.  Receiving a lot of data at the time you need it least is useless.  If you come across something interesting, save it to a folder for later reading.  What you will find is if you are not willing to spend the time saving and categorizing the data is was never worth looking at in the first place and would have just gathered dust on the corner of your desk.

At the end of the day if you keep focused on your goals and driving the right results, the decisions are easy.  They key is not to lose sight of the goal while data is coming at you at an alarming rate. 

www.marketproinc.com