“Marketing people sell themselves well.” How to choose the right person in 5 steps.

“Marketing is smoke”, some engineer friends told me once. You can’t without it, even more so in these times when there are almost no face-to-face business meetings and traditional marketing doesn’t “work”, and you can’t with it :).

Managers are in a delicate situation; I was talking to some of them lately: “I’m not from marketing, I don’t know what I need, but I feel like I need something, maybe digital marketing.”

Trusted people, managers or talent finders have confessed this to me, going beyond the professional relationship and entering their daily challenges.

There are companies that didn´t do marketing until now, or marketing was reduced to a few brochures, a basic website, eventually social media and press releases; there were meetings, lunches, outdoor and buying confidence.

The “return to normality” is still a long way off and renewed marketing is in power. Without proper marketing, businesses don’t exist or they won’t survive.

Marketing finally fulfills its objective, becoming strategic marketing, from the mission and vision of the company to the concept of communication — which without creativity will not be seen, until the last implementation and communication in social media, such as video marketing or content marketing, more valued than ever, helping sales strategy and lead generation, along with internal marketing, that keeps remote workers informed, motivated and happy.

Managers, leaders know this, and apart from accepting and integrating change into themselves, adaptation must be very fast, like getting on a train that is moving. Who are you taking with you? Maybe you don’t even know if you can afford it in the long term. There is an ocean of consultants, agencies, tons of books and so many marketing fields.

Whom do you choose with lucidity, confidence and tranquility? I’m going to guide you to make sure you make the right choice.

1. Breathe and think: what is your goal as CEO / leader, is it clear to you?

As we live in special times, sometimes salvation is seen in marketing, as something extraordinary and creative, but sometimes you need more a business strategy than marketing. There is pure strategic marketing, different from what is executed every day, that comes as a consequence. As in life, in most cases, salvation is in yourself.

Change always begins in “the head”, with the turn that the CEO gives a company and reaches the marketing department. It is true that in many companies that work there is someone from marketing on the board of directors.

A company can reconfigure its business strategy, expand or compress, internationalize, specialize, establish a management system with OKRs, lower them to departments so that people know where they are going and have a guide to expected results, which many times motivate. More about OKRs.: https://www.whatmatters.com/resources/google-okr-playbook/

The CAME strategies, coming from SWOT, the Porter chain, the Ansoff matrix and all these “old” tools or the more modern terms, working on “Salience”, “Distinctive assets” and “Memory Structures” can be worked by a marketing consultant but also from any part of management to give the right turn to your business.

2. What do you need from a “marketing” person?

Put expectations on paper and communicate them — this will give you guidance if you need a full time person for certain marketing functions, an agency on a one-off or long-term basis, or a closer and more committed interim management that makes you the diagnosis, the plan the department and resources, the implementation plan, and commit to results.

I have seen many times job offers that asked for: strategic marketing thinking, leadership vision along with specialist requirements of SEO, SEM, web design, e-commerce, illustration, adobe and copywriting and that in fact they only needed one person to handle the Mailchimp B2B. Asking 1 person for the work of 10 marketing specialists in their own field is an illusion that carries costs :).

Since marketing is all this, we need 1 person to take care of it, right? :).

If you do not know much about marketing, and it is normal, maybe the solution is an interim management that can make you the plan you need to meet your business objectives and proposals on how to approach and hire various marketing resources, permanently, temporary or occasional, depending on the plan of activities, their frequency and assigned budget and coordinate all these resources to start.

Sometimes, you just need content marketing, or a person who is dedicated to social networks or lead generation marketing online that you can guide.

3. Make sure the person understands your field of activity

Marketing is like football or medicine, we all know something about it. What few people know is that grassroots marketing principles are the same regardless of industry. A good professional will adapt to any industry or field of activity, with good market research and will understand the rules of the sector very well in 2–4 weeks, in addition, they will provide insights from another area and this is priceless.

This capacity depends on each professional, depending on their professional experience (in how many sectors they have worked), their background, the personal level of creativity and mental flexibility, their way of being.

The “only attitude counts, that skills can be learned” is not true in this case, you need someone to understand with an open and “worked out” business mind.

Ask him/her about his experience, his/her challenges and present him/her a study case of your sector to see how he/she thinks and how the person responds to you in a conversation about your sector.

If you have found the person you need from point 2, give them some time to research your market, your competition and talk to the person, you will ensure that they have understood before hiring them permanently or temporarily. Being in a hurry costs too. Both parties.

4. Personality and empathy

If you need a person to work permanently in your company, make sure that will fit your dream team, otherwise it will cost you and the person time, money, and wasted illusions.

For this reason, you should make a realistic list, with the good and the bad of your company, from the workflow to the personality of the people. It is worth paying for a professional test that will give you very adequate results, such as PredictiveIndex https://www.predictiveindex.com/ or Harrisonassesments, https://harrisonassessments.com/, rather then spend your priceless time molding a person up to you.

If you don’t want to pay for the tests, at least invite the selected candidate to a coffee, so you can eliminate subjective factors that sooner or later will come up.

As an anecdote, I remember that at one point in my career, my boss told me that he did not want to hire a person, that was very capable, because she looked like Dracula and did not want to spend evenings working with her in the same office — so simple, so subjective — and these things still happen under various forms of prejudice. If you have them, be honest- with yourself Better sooner than later for both.

If the position is interim management, integration in the team does not count, what is important is that they understand your sector, the challenges of your company and that they have the ability to understand what resources are in the company and what they are like, to see with which resources can the plan be implemented and how to assimilate them within.

Many times it is a relief that a person from outside tells you what you thought a long time before, but you did not have the courage to apply changes. Another perspective coming from a trained eye always helps on the subject of teams, responsibilities, workflow and other processes.

5. Commitment

What are you most committed to, delivery time, results or relational integration?

The commitment / enthusiasm of the beginning fades quickly when there is no leadership — and here we return to point 1. For this reason, sometimes a consultant may have more “cold blood” to propose a system of measurement and expectations, than an employee who will never propose some things or state some truths for obvious reasons.

Marketing is not objective, the evaluation of a person is never objective, you will never have control or access to an absolute truth as in engineering, and for this reason it is very difficult for technical profiles to assimilate and understand a marketing profile, which they have another kind of thinking.

I have noticed it myself, experiencing jobs in engineering teams during my EMBA. I’ve heard that “marketing is smoke”, rightly or out of frustration of not getting it :).

The implementation is what counts, and thus the marketing professional who has assumed responsibility for results in your company, coming from a professional management system, will roll up his sleeves, agree on expectations and communicate permanently with the top management, two-way intermediary communication for full completion.

As in every relationship, communication is a duty between the 2 parties, to adjust expectations in an environment so volatile, subjective and often with results in a horizon of 1 year, such as marketing. In performance marketing, the results can appear starting with 6 months from the agreed strategic beginning and in brand marketing the horizon is almost 1 year, with exponential results in the following years.

For this reason, strategic marketing is a bet, which involves a lot of responsibility and trust, to receive everything you must give everything, and vice versa :). It is very similar to personal relationships; maybe you should ask the marketing professional if he/she has a long-term relationship, to find out if he/she can get on a boat with you in an ocean where sooner or later a storm will come, so natural in the ocean as in marketing.