Marketing Talent Management: Building and Retaining High Performance Marketing Teams

Today’s most competitive marketplace isn’t technology but talent. The challenge of attracting and retaining the right talent is particularly acute for marketers. Their function has witnessed a massive transformation due to the advent of digital technology, connected consumers and empowered employees. MarTech Advisor’s Marketing Talent Management video chat hosted by Christine Crandell, President at New Business Strategies, featuring Amy Love, VP Corporate Marketing at TriNet and Julie Gibbs, former VP Corporate Marketing at Gigamon explores the core skills and capabilities required by the modern marketing function.

Part I: Ideal Marketing Skill Sets  

 

 

Christine outlines four key factors that really help shape organizations – skillsets, agility, accountability, and internal and customer alignment. There has been a significant shift in the level of expertise that modern marketing organizations demand today. The sheer volume of data available to marketers has certainly been a gamechanger. It has become increasingly crucial for marketers to leverage these insights to personalize all consumer touchpoints. In fact, a recent report from Salesforce states that 52 percent of consumers are extremely or somewhat likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make an effort to personalize their communication with them.

In addition to understanding the martech ecosystem at a fundamental level, you need to look for marketers who understand how their role aligns with the end business objectives of your organization.  Julie says, “It’s not about how successful your marketing tactics are anymore – you can’t just report and say, we got x number of leads which converted to this number or meetings, you have to be completely aligned with the executive team across the board to make sure that you’ve got the right KPIs and analytics in place.”

Part II: Alignment within teams

 

 

Customers are at the core of marketing innovation today, and marketers need to apply their competitive market intelligence, technical skills and creativity to improve the overall customer experience. This helps you develop a strong go-to-market strategy and business credibility. Marketing is not only about demand generation anymore, it is everything from driving strategy to driving demand to aligning with sales and also understand what’s going on with the customer base.

With such a long list of capability requirements both Amy and Julie agree that it is challenging for marketers to possess the right base generalist knowledge, and then stay on top of all the specialized skill sets that are now expected. According to Amy, the right skill set also depends on what stage the company is at, for instance, if you are hiring for a start-up you’d want to go broad with a generalist but for larger organizations, it’ll be very challenging for a generalist marketer to keep up with the rate of change in specialized fields so there’s an emphasis on specializations such as performance marketing, marketing automation, social media, content marketing, or conventional marketing.

Part III: Creating a culture of Accountability

 

 

Skill sets in data, technology and agility is something that is important to companies of all types and sizes, Julie says, “You have to have some notion of data governance and processes.” Marketers who’ve previously worked with tech companies are more likely to appreciate how fundamental data is to the business. Today, organizations do not have issues with the quantity of data available, it is the data quality that drives changes and determines how you go to market. A key component of your data governance and application is determined by a martech stack.

Speaking about building an efficient martech stack, Julie says, “I’m a big fan of keeping it simple and applying those add-on tools when you need it. You’ve got to have some sort of a marketing automation and email marketing tool in place because the core capabilities of CRM systems aren’t that flexible.” According to Amy there are four key things to keep in mind while choosing a martech vendor – obsessively test everything, go for short-term contracts, get a review from the vendor to know how effectively you’re leveraging the technology and set benchmarks and baselines for the team.

While innovation, data and technology are integral for marketing success, they could also work against you if you aren’t completely focused on solving issues or exploring all the opportunities that your customers truly care about.