The Marketer Persona

First, let's focus on some key attributes we as marketers tend to have. Although it may not apply to every marketer you've ever met, we are largely an aspirational, driven and hard-working group—typically not very good at saying no. We skew younger in age because the pace early in our career is typically insane and full of 80-hour weeks and responsibility that exceeds the number of years we've been on the planet. (For example—I was 25 with 10 people reporting to me, and had about $2M of annual P&L on my head.)

Those early years are critically foundational for a marketer. You choose your area of specialty—ad agency or digital, when I was coming up—and hopefully build your early experience working with some of the best minds in your executive structure. You learn quickly whether you're more comfortable in the multiclient chaos of the agency world, or if you perform best when deeply immersed into a single brand and working in corporate. You also normally delineate between being a marketing practitioner or a people manager. Some people just love marketing execution in their soul, but others are focused on getting promoted and managing people. Neither is right or wrong; you just have to figure out where you feel more comfortable. Finding a candidate who has an equal passion for both is like running across a rainbow unicorn—grab it quickly, and be prepared to nurture and protect it for years!

Another powerful trait among marketers is that we're pretty good estimators of all sorts of things—response rates, people's intentions, salespeople's BS quotient, campaign success, and so forth. This certainly is a skill we build over time, but I find even the youngest marketers among us have the passion to pay close attention to how they're marketed to, and be able to take cues and data from that experience. They may not be able to logically defend their choices, but gut instinct is doubtlessly part of being a great marketer. I often tell mid-level marketers that they're probably way better predictors than they think they are, and when concocting A/B tests to make sure the two choices are almost diametrically opposed.

Interestingly enough, marketers also tend to take a bit of dramatic license—especially when describing how busy they are. This doesn't mean that every marketing department has all the staff it needs; but almost every marketer I talk to has no idea how they'll make time to do anything differently. I'm going to peg that quotient at 70 percent true, and 30 percent of it is the result of us being creative people with a slightly elevated self-worth.

And finally, we're almost all relatively social beings. No group inside a company throws a Halloween party like marketing, right? (Except maybe sales.) Everyone dresses up. People sneak alcohol in. There's a predefined after-party spot already picked out. We love to have fun—both at work and at play—and we're pretty good at blurring the lines between the two.

I offer this in-depth persona for two specific reasons: (1) self-awareness is an amazing trait, and knowing how others perceive us can be worth its weight in gold; and (2) these attributes are exactly the motivational factors that marketing leadership needs to understand and index toward. After all, knowing is half the battle, right?

Two Key Traits: Potential and Grit

So how do we use this information about how we work to more effectively build out marketing teams? Firstly, as I emphasized in Chapter 3—focus on potential. Hiring director-level talent is about pure performance and people-management skills, but you should view everyone below that level through the lens of a single question: “How great could they be with the right guidance?”

That assumes two important facts: (1) you have the right managers to deliver the best guidance; and (2) the individual can capably manage the basic responsibilities of the role. This doesn't mean you should hire the smartest aeronautical engineer to run your database marketing team because both roles thrive on great math skills, but it's essential to be flexible in a great candidate's direct work experience and your job requirements. Maybe that overly extroverted database manager you just interviewed would be a great numbers- and process-driven social media manager. Or maybe that amazing email marketing manager you just interviewed is really the person to take you into the future of behavioral marketing at the director level, and you're about to have to make a tough decision about who leads that function in your group.

The other reason to hire on potential is the best way to build an epic top-to-bottom team is to “raise 'em like you want 'em.” You're always going to face the cost pressures of retaining great talent at the director level, so why not build out a corporate version of a baseball farm team? Make training and mentorship a key role of your managers, and build an environment that generates brilliance by design. You'll gain a reputation as a great place to work (and, yes, all those socially active marketers talk all the time about new places to work), and you'll maximize the time you have with the brightest candidates you can find and develop.

The other attribute I sought out was an intangible I didn't quite know how to articulate before I attended a marketing leadership roundtable event put on by the Corporate Executive Board in late 2012. That was where I was introduced to the term grit. The CEB summarized the definition like this:

Focusers win because they have “grit”—the ability to overcome adversity to reach higher-order goals:

• Gritty people (e.g., focusers) are defined by an extraordinary ability to stay focused on higher-order goals and overcome challenges to achieve them.
• Gritty people are particularly successful in unstructured, ambiguous, and challenging environments.
• In fact, grit is the strongest predictor of success in many environments—above and beyond the impact of IQ and other positive traits.

I wrote an entire blog post about the topic (http://bit.ly/grittymarketers) soon after returning from that event. It outlines the concept at a much deeper level—and links to the primary research in its entirety. I summarized it like this:

The most important takeaway for me was you don't need (or want) someone who can give the perception of riding every wave — the most effective players are the ones who can see the longer game, prioritize the solutions and execute to the end.

So go figure out what grit means to you and to your hiring and professional development effort.

Making Great Marketing Managers

I'm no HR guru, but I can add a bit more detail on hiring and grooming great managers—primarily because I used to hang a lot of responsibility on them to manage employees with great potential into strong team players.

First of all, if you're executing perfectly, you should be promoting your managers from your internal groups. Everyone should understand the importance of mentoring and training exactly like the mentoring and training they received. Short of that perfection, I'm always looking for someone I believe can excel in the manager role—which is the absolute point of marketing execution.

A director or VP must ensure—even demand—that the manager spends time developing their people; and I don't mean weekly 15-minute standing meetings to talk through program status, I mean at least an hour a week in pure mentoring where manager-level tasks, data points, and thought processes are discussed in a two-way interactive format. Believe me, you want a great manager to create another great manager to ensure continuity over time (and to save you a lot of time wasted during a typical hiring process), and building that into the manager's role is positive for both the manager and direct report.

Marketing is not a game that's won by the brilliant loner in the corner who uncovers some ancient secret to more effective response rates. It's most successful when it's out in the glorious sunlight—when you communicate strategy, empower and expect people to contribute, and the team shares the wins.

If that sounds kind of too idealistic or altruistic, remember you're dealing with a generation that's now much more concerned with being challenged and happy at their job than they are with the hours they work. Harness that power to become an employer of choice for the smartest rising managers and interns coming out of the best universities close to you, and you'll be significantly more successful in your own career.