When you re-hire marketers for your Q4 'rebuild'...think '2024', not '2022'.

Last week I caught up with (in my opinion) the UK’s best recruiter for senior marketing leadership.

He told me the job market is returning to full strength. “In terms of fees,” he said, “August stands to be our second best month of 2023 so far.”

If he’s right this is happy news for all of us.?

‘Maybe’.?

Wait, only a ‘maybe’? No - there’s no doubt here - this is unequivocally positive, right? This is businesses acting on the confidence they’re feeling and replenishing their marketing resource to go and attack their growth plans. Right?

And following wave after wave of lay-offs - conservatively, more than 250,000 in the tech sector alone in the past 18 months - this can only be welcome.?

So come on then…why only a ‘maybe’??

Well, because when it comes to re-hiring marketing leadership to give your sales and GTM teams the edge they’ll need to go and smash Q4, many businesses will take this long-awaited opportunity and turn it into an anchor; a heavy weight that will drag on growth and slow any momentum.??

The way they’ll do it is by hiring wrong. And then of course - whether it be sooner or later - paying the price.?

Recruiting marketing leadership - vision, strategic focus and experience - is difficult.?

It often requires hiring teams to be comfortable knowing what they don’t know.?

Businesses don’t like doing that. When it comes to hiring marketing they prefer to focus on the parts of the discipline they do know and feel comfortable with. That’s generally anything that can be measured. A good start but really - that’s all it is. A start.????

The vast majority of recruiters - especially internal headhunters but this also goes for a lot of agencies - is that they understand only marketing skills and tactics. Not marketing as a discipline.?

The mistake that will be made in (I estimate) nine out of every 10 marketing hires, is that the person you’ll hire will be a decent marketing practitioner, rather than a marketing leader.??

The practitioner will be really good with the small part of the marketing pie you think you want - say, lead-gen or content.

They won’t be so good at standing back to figure out the best, most-balanced, optimised and integrated marketing strategy, tailored to the specific needs of your business in Q4 and 2024.?

Have you ever seen the 2011 Bradley Cooper movie Limitless? Cooper plays a 'down and out'-turned-genius when he comes across a manufactured drug called NZT-48.?

It happened to be on telly yesterday.

NZT allows Cooper to access 100% of his brain's power as opposed to the mere 10% average human beings are said to use regularly.???

That's B2B marketing for me. As an industry I believe we use no more than 10% of the combined sales and marketing 'brain' to power our growth strategies. We use numbers and build (often stodgy, lifeless, uncreative and inflexible) processes as proxies for properly understanding customers and using that understanding to grow our businesses.?

So many of the marketing tools at our disposal - brand, market research, segmentation, genuine storytelling, creativity, leadership and insight - no, data isn't the same thing - are starkly absent from the average B2B marketing function or even lead-gen machine.

At the recent MAD//Fest event in London, PepsiCo marketing director Lee Houston told her audience that the economic, political and social climate we’re all adjusting to is “not a storm” but rather “the weather from now on.”

Citing disruption caused by the likes of Covid and the cost-of-living crisis, Houston predicted further shocks to our political, technological and economic systems and said it will be down to marketers to navigate tough questions for businesses.?

“How do you balance answering fundamental customer needs,” she asked, “with knowing those needs will keep changing?”

That kind of contribution doesn’t require additional tactical resources. It requires leadership; a leader; someone who’ll take on the marketing function and turn it so it faces in the same direction as your other functions and help drive them towards your strategic goals.?

There are many hundreds of marketing leaders looking for their next chance to add cold, hard value to a business that’s willing to make room for them to be the marketing expert and do the job.?

Whether you’re hiring a full-time member of staff or - as many are right now - looking to try before you buy with the right consultancy or fractional support, go at the process with an open mind.

You’ll know your brief and understand your challenges better than any new colleague. But once you’ve planted with them the question, be ready for different answers and conversations from those you may have expected.?

Because it’s probably not a replacement for 2022’s version of marketing you’re looking for right now.

I’m back from my Summer holidays and here to support you with your B2B go-to-market / marketing strategies and execution.