How to hire your next marketing leader

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Are you looking for results from your next marketing leader? How will you know what to look for?

Almost every day I see companies hiring marketing leaders. Most times they do a series of marketing events and create content, yet those companies don’t get the kind of results they want and need. Why not?

In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the key reasons why one hire is better than another.

First some background.

Marketing trumps Sales today — your CMO is a more important hire than your new VP of Sales. (Since I began saying that, the differences have grown even greater.) In this post, Mr. CEO, I’m going to help you hire your new Chief Marketing Officer.CMO

In order to look for a top marketing leader for our company, we first have to define Marketing.

What is the purpose of Marketing? Is it to promote the brand, as a marketing person at a large software company said? No it is not, Mr. CEO. The purpose of Marketing is this:

To help Sales sell by filling sales funnels with quality sales leads.

First and foremost, make sure your marketing leader buys into that idea. Here are other things he or she needs too.

  • Strategies to attract the right kind of customers.
  • Empowerment of sales to give the right messages to the right executives at the right time.
  • And continual refinement and tuning.

Messaging and content are also critical. In this noisy, complex world where products are commoditized every day, we need a marketing leader that can distill your offerings down to their very essence, figure out the business outcomes that result, map a buying process, and design multi-modal campaigns that not only get interest, but build relationships based on trust.

And as the great book Content Rules said, he must excel at “talking human” messaging. Your messaging needs to resonate with prospective buyers using simple, everyday language.

Look for a process.

He or she needs a strong framework around lead generation programs and clear understanding of topics such as social media, buyer personas, lead nurturing, lead scoring, handoff to sales, marketing metrics and more. I have posted a good marketing framework process here:

We also need our new CMO to truly understand customers, so he or she needs to spend a lot of time on the road visiting customers. In addition, customer-facing groups like sales and support need a lot of face time.

He or she will have to develop a lead generation blueprint. I recommend you speak with AquireB2B and leverage their expertise.

He or she will have to craft strong value propositions. Please speak with Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies, who is one of the foremost experts on value propositions.

Lastly, does your new CMO really understand sales? Many top marketing leaders tell me that sales experience is a prerequisite for marketing leadership today.

“If marketing to prospective customers is like cooking for chefs, Jeff Ogden is the Wolfgang Puck of marketing. His insights, instincts and ingenuity about getting customers engaged and keeping them involved are well known in the industry. And, he’s a heck of a nice guy to boot. I wouldn’t hesitate to work with Jeff now or in the future.” Steve Gershick, Demandcon founder.

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Jeff Ogden
Jeff Ogden (http://jeff-ogden.brandyourself.com) is President of the Tampa based Find New Customers demand generation agency. http://www.findnewcustomers.com .

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