Bob Van Rossum September 4, 2020 The key to growing your company and increasing revenue relies on having the right Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). In today’s market, what consumers are looking for is changing. Some companies are having to refocus their brand to gain the attention and loyalty of their target market. Brands that can align with their audiences’ values will enable more growth opportunities in the future. Therefore, if you want to steer ahead of your competitors, your CMO must perform at the highest level. While it may sound easy, it is difficult to work across evolving channels and keep up with messaging if you have the wrong talent. The reality is the CMO role has had the shortest tenure in the C-Suite for the last twenty years. As the leading CMO executive search firm, MarketPro understands why this challenge exists and has been built to solve it.
Being a great CEO or senior HR leader does not give you the functional expertise in marketing necessary to separate “A” players from everyone else. Therefore, there needs to be a significant amount of marketing expertise in your vetting process to hire the best CMO. Knowing what to expect from your marketing executive and ultimately what is possible is crucial to your search. What are your key performance indicators? Can your CMO lead your marketing team effectively? What kind of experience does the CMO need to get to the end result? Placing a candidate with an impressive resume on your team may seem simple. However, non-marketers face the possibility of missing signs in the interview process that would have been a deal-breaker for former marketers who are now focused on marketing executive search.
The success of a candidate cannot be simplified into a checklist. You need the knowledge to go into deeper marketing conversations with them to understand how their mind works and the impact they are capable of having. Developing a mix of competency and behavioral-based questions specific to your success metrics is crucial to hire the best possible person. However, knowing what competency-based questions to ask and what a good answer looks like takes years of experience in both marketing and executive search.
To minimize your risk of a potential bad hire, CMO executive search firm highlights what you should expect from your next chief marketing officer.
CMO Executive Search Firm Explain Why You Need A Great CMO:
Revenue
The best CMO knows their job is to drive top-line and bottom-line growth. If they are able to implement the right message at the right time within the right channel it will result in better communication and engagement. Ultimately, revenue is heavily correlated with your marketing strategy. You need a CMO who has a clear vision of your future and the direction your company can go, including brand, product, innovation, etc.
In addition, you need to make sure your CMO is measuring your customer interactions effectively. Being able to understand the data and drive better decision making will ensure profitability and reduce the stress of the CEO. The best way to ensure a better return on investment is to hire the right CMO from the start. The longer it takes to effectively communicate with your audience the more time you are giving them to become loyal to a competitor.
Brand awareness
In today’s market, a purpose-led brand will gain more market share than a brand who is marketing without one. The emotional connection you have with the customer builds long-term loyalty for your company. Many of today’s customers want to be a part of your brand’s story, not just a consumer. If you can assure your customers that your organization is creating a better community and stands behind a mission, you will reap the benefits in the long-run.
To effectively create brand awareness, you need the right leadership. A creative mindset is essential to make your brand’s story captivating. Unfortunately, capturing the attention of your customers at the right moment is challenging. With this time-sensitive task, the CMO must have an effective strategy to remain competitive. So what has your CMO done to increase positive brand awareness? Are your communications incorporating the needs and wants of your customers? Can your marketing executive listen and deliver value to your target audience?
One of the primary elements of a strong foundation is brand recognition. With many consumers switching to online platforms, companies must filter through the competition. This is when consistency becomes important. Your mission statement and values must be incorporated into all emails, social posts, blogs, websites, etc. The faster consumers can recognize your brand and connect it with your values, the easier your products/services can be marketed. Therefore, top CMOs must therefore embrace the current marketing changes to rapidly recover as the economy returns to the new standard.
Customer experience
As the head of marketing, the CMO needs to understand your customer’s likes, preferences, and what they value. This will play into all the communications you have with your audience. If your interactions fall short of the customer’s expectations, it has the potential to break the relationship. Therefore, part of the CMO’s responsibilities is to create an experience that will lead to brand loyalty and repeat business.
The goal is to make the journey as seamless as possible. Each touchpoint must play a role in where the customer’s mind is at. CMOs can not just rely on data to create a successful path. While having an analytical mindset is a great aspect for a CMO to have, they must reach deeper into customer feedback and complaints. Developing a great cross-functional approach within the organization will ensure the buyer’s journey flows smoothly.
This is your opportunity to evolve as a brand. It takes more than the marketing team to provide the best customer experience. Is your CMO collaborating with different departments? Are you and your company pushing in the same direction? Overcoming these challenges starts with having the right internal champion who is a visionary.
MarketPro Has Provided Tips To Successfully Hire A Great CMO:
Evaluate Your Business
Most companies today recognize the CMO role is critical to the success of their business. However, that does not mean organizations know how to determine what the goals of the role should be and what makes a candidate capable of exceeding expectations. Defining the success for your CMO starts with having extensive expertise in marketing and executive search. With that knowledge, you can determine the area you want your CMO to focus on. This will narrow down what kind of career path you prefer your marketing executive to have.
With some companies cutting marketing budgets, you need to determine if your CMO is performing at the highest level. Are you reaching the customer? How are customers engaging? Are customers completing the buying process? If the answer is no, you most likely do not have the right leader for the job.
To reduce the risk of a bad hire, you must have all the essential elements to perform the best marketing executive search. Does your recruitment team have marketing expertise? Do you understand how you are defining success for that role? It is a big investment to conduct the hiring process and place an executive candidate. Therefore, if you are not confident that you will lead a successful search, consider partnering with a specialized recruitment firm.
Partner With Experts
The unique structure of different companies makes it difficult to hire the right CMO. You can not use the same methods as your competitors. The biggest mistake MarketPro sees daily is non-marketers conducting the search. Even with the best recruiters, there are deeper aspects of a CMO executive search you must consider. The best method for determining quality candidates is to have extensive experience in the field itself. While there are a lot of great marketing executives in today’s market, the hard part is differentiating the best marketing executive for your organization.
Partnering with specialized CMO recruiters allows you to select only the best candidates for your firm. Therefore, MarketPro’s team comes from all different backgrounds of marketing. Our CMO recruiters dive deeply into understanding what your team needs. We use our extensive experience to carefully screen each candidate so that our clients are on their path to success. By investing in the top chief marketing officer for your organization, you give your team a competitive edge. This is your chance to pull ahead of your competitors and gain more market share as we return to the new normal.
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