3 Proven Strategies to Attract Top Revenue Marketers
By
Christina Nobles
Hiring and retaining great talent, especially in marketing, is critical for a successful go-to-market strategy. After all, marketing is the key to revenue growth. With the wrong marketing team in place, the lead funnel (and revenue growth) will be stagnant. Attracting the best talent can be difficult, and top candidates are pickier than ever. Luckily, there are 3 ways to set your company apart from the rest.
Understand Your Trajectory
Top revenue marketing leaders are responsible for aligning marketing efforts with revenue generation and driving measurable outcomes. They implement data driven strategies and use technology to calculate attribution, optimize performance and produce the desired results. Therefore, goals must be clearly defined for your company.
The first step to achieving this clarity is understanding where your company is, and where it’s going. It then becomes easy to understand how the right revenue marketer will hit these goals. Some key questions to ask are:
What does the business need at this stage of growth?
What are the revenue projections and goals for the next 6, 12, 24 months?
Who are our buyer personas and what experience is needed to message them?
Additionally, ensure that your marketing strategy aligns with the company’s overall objectives. Top talent understands that they need to produce quick wins and make an impact early on. They are looking for both short-term (90-180 days) and long-term (6-18 month) accomplishments.
This leads to the next critical piece – willingness to invest. Top marketers know that the right long-term investments are critical to creating a revenue-generating machine. In today’s environment this investment must be right sized to the current budget plan. It is about incremental investments in staff to build capabilities in-house. It’s about carefully reviewed new program spend that is tied directly to new pipeline. Show that your company is willing to invest in the right areas. And that they will trust in the marketing leader’s strategic ability to provide proven results. Top marketers will then line up to lead the team.
Providing a Positive Customer Experience
The second way to attract the best talent is to provide a positive customer experience (CX). A marketer’s number one job is to make prospects desire their solution and act. A less than stellar customer experience makes this much harder. As does a product or solution that doesn’t do what it promises. Bad experiences and unmet expectations drive clients away and makes attracting new ones less likely. Similarly, it also drives away top marketing talent.
Unfortunately, a poor CX is not uncommon. 65% of buyers wish companies would respond faster to meet their changing needs. But 88% of executives think customers are changing faster than their business can keep up. Ensure that your portfolio has the tools in place to understand their buyers and their customer journey. For example, clearly defined buyer personas and the buying process map are critical to creating a positive CX.
A positive customer experience also helps your organization stand out from the competition. Which again makes a marketing leader’s job that much easier. Competitor differentiation and competitor replacement strategies become viable ways to contribute to revenue growth. A positive CX makes a great marketing talent break down walls to become your top candidate.
Highlight an Attractive Company Culture
The last, and probably most important, thing top revenue marketers are looking for is culture. Culture can be broken down to a few items when it comes to attracting top talent:
Management style
Transparency
Strategic vision
Top marketing leaders want strong leadership from the business they work in. But they also want the right level of autonomy to accomplish great things. Micro-managing all aspects of the business, including the marketing, is a red flag for top marketers. Instead offer collaboration and openness to new strategic ideas. The best marketing talent is looking for peer support, cross-functional alignment, and coaching. They want to align with the leadership team and feel trusted to do their job effectively.
Transparency is equally important. Companies need to be honest in all aspects of the business, especially about challenges. Ambitious, top marketers won’t run from challenges – in fact, it will excite them. They just want to know what they are getting into. Be upfront about lack of systems, processes or overall marketing understanding or functionality. When presented candidly, this provides even more opportunities. A top revenue marketer will see it as a way to make a large impact.
Finally, attract the best marketing talent by showcasing the company’s strategic vision. An organization with clear values, meaningful purpose and goals will be more attractive to top prospects. Ensure you provide an environment that includes:
Ownership and accountability – the entire leadership should have buy-in and say in the strategic direction of the company.
Results and data focused – this allows the best leaders to understand if their approach is successful. It also allows for different iterations if not.
Agile (but stable) – marketing needs to be able to change quickly when it’s not working. A balanced approach to strategic activities and tactics is ideal.
Highly competent marketing talent is a top priority for revenue generating organizations. With these three tips, you have a greater chance of attracting and retaining the best talent. Which then leads to hitting revenue goals and increased value creation.
