Finding the C-Suite Unicorn: How Executive Search Lands Top Talent

Finding the C-Suite Unicorn: How Executive Search Lands Top Talent

by | Aug 20, 2024 | Fractional CMO, Insights, Marketing Insights, Marketing Strategy, Outsourced Marketing

Finding the C-Suite Unicorn: How Executive Search Lands Top Talent

Finding well-qualified talent for senior leadership positions (aka the executive search process) presents quite a challenge. From niche industries to competitive salaries, companies have a ton to consider when attracting top-tier candidates for these crucial roles.

Enter the executive search firms. These specialists partner with companies to find the perfect fit for C-suite executives, VPs, and other leadership positions. Executive recruiters understand the complexities of senior-level hiring. By leveraging their industry expertise and networks, executive search firms streamline recruitment and ensure companies hire the best candidates. Keep reading to learn how executive search professionals act like talent scouts.

What is the difference between executive search and recruitment?

Before we dive into the executive search process, let’s clarify the difference between executive search and recruitment agencies. They aren’t the same.

Executive search agencies

These specialized recruiters focus on filling senior-level and C-suite positions critical for a company’s success. These firms often have expertise in specific sectors like healthcare, retail, or technology. An industry focus allows these professionals to build deep networks of qualified candidates. For example, a firm specializing in CMO roles can leverage its knowledge to deliver a perfect fit via careful screening and post-placement support.

Consider hiring an executive search agency if you’re:

  • Filling senior-level management or executive roles
  • Finding qualified candidates for hard-to-fill positions
  • Maintaining confidentiality during your search
  • Identifying top talent in niche or specialized industries

Recruitment agencies

Need to fill a position quickly, and you’re less focused on a long-term leadership hire? Recruitment agencies can help you fill those gaps. They specialize in finding qualified candidates for a wide range of roles.

Consider hiring a recruitment agency if you’re:

  • Filling entry-level through mid-management roles
  • Finding candidates for roles not requiring highly specialized skill sets
  • Quickly staffing multiple open positions

Depending on your company’s current needs, these agency types serve an essential purpose.

What is the executive search process?

Finding the perfect candidate for a leadership role — a process that can take an average of four to six weeks to narrow the list to the most qualified candidates and another few weeks (or even months) to make the final decision — typically follows these steps.

Step 1: Know Your Needs and Define the Position
Finding the perfect leaders starts with understanding your company’s goals and analyzing its landscape. What challenges are you facing? What opportunities are you trying to seize? Answering these questions helps define the skills and knowledge your new leader needs.

Step 2: Craft a Candidate Profile
Build a detailed picture of your ideal candidate by gathering information from hiring managers about the required skill set, education and experience levels, desired behavioral traits, and specific challenges the new leader will face.

Step 3: Begin Outreach
Executive searches go beyond traditional recruitment methods. C-suite candidates are sometimes not actively seeking new opportunities. Develop a compelling recruitment strategy showcasing your company’s unique strengths and vision. Use professional networking sites like LinkedIn to build rapport with candidates.

Step 4: Assess Potential Beyond the Resume
Evaluate senior leaders with a nuanced approach. After pre-qualification, only a select number (typically 2-5) of candidates remain. The agency briefs you on each candidate, sharing insights and recommendations. In-depth interviews and possibly cognitive ability tests are crucial for uncovering the specialized traits and leadership potential needed for success.

Step 5: Decision Time
Once you review your shortlist, the interview process begins, often involving key stakeholders within your organization. The executive search professionals will guide you through this stage for a smooth, efficient evaluation by presenting data and candidate scorecards to help you make an informed decision. Before extending the offer, conduct thorough background and reference checks. Craft a competitive compensation package that reflects the value they bring and lean on the executive search firm during negotiations.

Step 6: Beyond the Offer
Your company’s relationship with the executive search firm doesn’t end with offer and acceptance. The lead consultant understands your organization, culture, and strategies and can become a trusted advisor. An ongoing partnership offers several benefits:

  • The consultant can provide ongoing advice and support on talent acquisition, leadership development, and overall business strategy.
  • Having a trusted partner allows for proactive discussions about future leadership needs and potential succession planning.
  • The search firm stays current on industry trends and can offer valuable insights into the talent landscape.
  • Staying connected with the new leader helps identify any roadblocks or areas where they might need additional guidance.
  • Executive coaching can help new leaders navigate the complexities of their new roles and develop strategies for achieving their goals.

How do executive search firms get paid?

Executive search firms offer a valuable service, but it comes at a cost. Usually, they charge 33-38% of the hired candidate’s first-year total cash compensation. Some firms may add charges for travel, direct search expenses, or a 10-15% administrative fee. Big firms like Heidrick & Struggles and Korn Ferry often start at $100,000 due to their global reach.

Boutique search firms, however, offer a more personalized approach with lower fees, making them increasingly popular.

How long is an executive search process?

The executive search process can range from a few weeks to several months, typically taking about 60-90 days. Factors include role complexity, candidate availability, interview efficiency, and time for evaluation and negotiation.

For immediate marketing leadership, partnering with an agency that places fractional CMOs can expedite this process. These agencies have pre-qualified, experienced CMOs ready to step in, reducing the search time to just a few weeks. This ensures you get top-tier expertise quickly, keeping your business on track.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, match me with a great-fit fCMO

Finding the perfect CMO isn’t a stroke of luck. It’s about working with experts who vet, handpick, and recommend the best candidates. Our fractional CMOs (fCMOs) adapt quickly to diverse business environments. We take the time to understand your market and needs, ensuring a smooth onboarding process.

Here’s how it works:

  • We collaborate to define your goals and qualifications for the ideal fCMO.
  • You choose from our network of 55+ experienced fCMOs.
  • Your fCMO creates a tailored strategy, leveraging our marketing team if needed.

Ready to find your perfect match? Contact us today to get started with an expert fCMO.

Download fCMO Overview
About &Marketing:

&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.

About the Author

As the Founder & CEO of &Marketing (www.and-marketing.com), Raj and his team strive to provide growing businesses unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj has more than two decades of experience in B2B and B2C marketing, sales, & strategy. He has led nearly 100 high-profile marketing strategy projects for Global 100, mid-sized clients, and SMBs, plus over a decade with General Electric and General Mills. He is a sought-after advisor and facilitator, with experience across five continents. He is known for bringing the best of ‘big company’ marketing and strategy to smaller companies without the baggage, his bias for practical implementation, and his unrelenting customer focus.

The Marketing KPIs That Really Matter for Business Growth

The Marketing KPIs That Really Matter for Business Growth

by | Aug 14, 2024 | Digital Marketing, Insights, Marketing Analytics, Marketing Insights, Marketing Strategy, SEM & Paid Advertising, SEO & Organic Search

The Marketing KPIs That Really Matter for Business Growth

The Marketing KPIs That Really Matter for Business Growth

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are like X-ray vision. Medical professionals use X-rays to see through objects and understand their internal structure. Marketers use KPIs to gain a clear view of their campaign’s performance. KPIs reveal the underlying factors driving success or failure. Just as X-rays help doctors determine the best course of treatment, KPIs enable businesses to make data-driven decisions and optimize their strategies.

The depth and breadth of these KPIs can present a challenge at times, but understanding their value—and which to prioritize—can really help drive business growth.

Why so many marketing KPIs?

The diversity of marketing activities requires a wide range of KPIs. Marketing encompasses various channels, goals, and stages of the customer journey, each needing specific measurements to assess effectiveness.

Different marketing channels

Each marketing channel has unique metrics to gauge performance:

  • Social media: likes, shares, comments, engagement rate, click-through rate (CTR), follower growth
  • Search engine marketing: CTR, conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS)
  • Content marketing: website traffic, time on site, bounce rate, shares, lead generation
  • Email marketing: open rate, CTR, conversion rate, unsubscribe rate
  • Traditional media: impressions, reach, frequency, cost per thousand impressions (CPM)

Different marketing goals

Marketing goals necessitate diverse KPIs:

  • Brand awareness: impressions, reach, social media mentions
  • Lead generation: website traffic, conversion rate, lead quality
  • Customer acquisition: CPA, customer lifetime value
  • Revenue generation: sales, average order value (AOV), revenue per customer

Different stages of the customer journey

KPIs also vary based on the customer journey stage:

  • Awareness: impressions, website traffic, social media reach
  • Consideration: engagement rate, time on site, bounce rate, lead generations
  • Decision: conversion rate, sales, customer acquisition cost
  • Retention: customer lifetime value, customer churn rate, net promoter score

By tailoring KPIs to these different aspects, businesses can effectively measure and optimize their marketing efforts.

What marketing KPIs should you be tracking?

Tracking a combination of KPIs provides the X-ray that marketers need to increase the granularity of their campaigns’ effectiveness. Tie them directly to your business goals and then prioritize. If you’re aiming for more customers, focus on customer-related KPIs, for example.

Specificity matters, too. Don’t just say, “Sales increased.” Say, “Online sales from new customers increased by 20%.” That’s a KPI with some punch. You must be able to measure your KPIs because if you can’t track it, you can’t measure it.

The magic happens when you turn those numbers into actions, and a good KPI tells you where to focus your energy. It’s that X-ray vision again showing you what’s working and what’s not, generating insights so you can make adjustments to boost the good stuff. Let’s look at some of these KPIs in more detail.

1. Leads: Leads are the lifeblood of any sales-driven business. The more high-quality leads you generate, the better your chances of converting them into customers. While lead quantity is important, lead quality matters more.

2. Return on investment (ROI): This marketing cornerstone provides essential insights into your campaigns’ effectiveness by showing whether your marketing spend translates into profitable results. ROI focuses on the decision stage of the customer journey, evaluating financial outcomes by compiling profit-related information into a single, powerful metric reflecting overall performance.

3. Cost per click (CPC): Marketing KPIs also offer valuable insights into your digital advertising bracket. The CPC calculates the average time spent when someone clicks on your paid ad. You need this metric to evaluate your ad campaigns’ efficiency. Tools like Google Ads provide detailed CPC data, helping you understand performance in real-time. CPC varies across industries and keywords, so research thoroughly before you launch a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. The average CPC on Google Ads is between $0.11 and $0.50. CPC averages on Facebook range between $0.30 and $2.00+.

4. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Lifetime Customer Value (CLTV): Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) measures the expense of converting prospects into paying customers, providing insight into the efficiency of your marketing efforts. Lifetime Customer Value (CLTV) represents the total revenue generated from a customer over their relationship with your business. By comparing CAC to CLTV, companies can assess the profitability of their customer acquisition strategies. If CAC exceeds CLTV, it signals that acquiring customers is more costly than their value, prompting a reevaluation of marketing tactics or target audiences

5. Conversion rate: This metric assesses marketing campaign effectiveness by measuring the percentage of website visitors or audience members who complete a desired action: sharing email for a newsletter, completing a contact form, or making a purchase. Tools like GA4 (Google Analytics) can help track and measure conversion rates to identify user behavior and areas for improvement.

6. Social media engagement (likes + comments + shares): Social media marketing needs engagement. This metric measures how your audience interacts with your content through likes, comments, shares, and other relevant actions. Social media platforms prioritize content with high engagement, which leads to more visibility for your posts, increased reach, and more potential followers. When you collaborate with influencers, engagement rate is a key metric to evaluate their potential impact. Use tools like Instagram’s calculator to determine the efficacy of influencer partnerships.

7. Click-through rate (CTR): This metric measures the percentage of visitors clicking on a link or ad. Tools like GA4 (Google Analytics) can provide in-depth CTA data, offering insights into ad, keyword, and content performance. Average CTRs vary across industries and platforms, with search typically higher than display ads. In email marketing, CTR is a key indicator of engagement.

8. Search engine and keyword ranking: Search engine rankings are critical for determining a website’s visibility and traffic. When your website ranks high for relevant keywords, you attract more potential customers. In general, just over 93% of Google users only look at the first SERP; only 6% scroll to the bottom of the page. Track key metrics like the number of ranking keywords, organic traffic volume, and number of backlinks to help you assess your SEO strategy’s effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.

KPIs as your marketing X-ray

KPIs are your marketing X-ray, providing a data-driven window to measure your marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement. They span departments and touchpoints, considering the entire customer journey. Like a comprehensive medical exam, a variety of KPI X-rays taken from multiple angles offer different perspectives of your marketing performance.

Implementing these principles empowers you to develop a robust KPI framework that drives meaningful impact and keeps your marketing efforts laser-focused on achieving your business goals. Download our marketing planning workbook to help you implement them so you can stay on track!

Need help identifying the most important KPIs for your business? Contact our team today.

Lessons any growing business can learn from the Stanley quencher

Lessons any growing business can learn from the Stanley quencher

by | Aug 9, 2024 | Branding, Fractional CMO, Insights, Marketing Strategy, Social Media

Lessons any growing business can learn from the Stanley quencher

Even the most well-established brands can find it challenging to grow in competitive markets. The massive popularity of Stanley Cup’s Quencher tumbler is a fascinating case study that demonstrates the power of letting your audience’s passion for your product guide your growth strategy—even if it’s an audience you didn’t know you had.

This blog will explain why the Stanley Cup Quencher is so popular, how Stanley used the cup to expand into a totally new target market, and our top takeaways from the Stanley Cup marketing strategy.

Stanley Cup Marketing History: The Quencher Launch

More than a century old, Stanley was founded by William Stanley Jr. in 1913, who invented the steel vacuum insulated bottle technology that maintains hot or cold temperatures for hours. The brand has been popular with outdoor enthusiasts and the construction industry thanks to its durability and practicality, the focus of Stanley Cup marketing for decades.

The Quencher was launched in 2016 but didn’t find much success with Stanley’s mostly male audience, so it was close to being discontinued forever. However, that changed when a different type of consumer discovered the product — and loved it.

What Is the Target Market for Stanley Cups?

When a co-founder of shopping blog The Buy Guide discovered the Stanley Quencher, she found it offered several features that made it a better choice than any other cup she had. She recommended the cup on the site and included it in promotional curated boxes sent to influencers. When a Stanley employee saw Bachelorette star Emily Maynard promoting the cup on social media, she was surprised that the cup appealed to a market completely different from the outdoorsy males Stanley Cup marketing typically targeted.

Stanley executives began leaning into and embracing this new target market, creating cups with different color ways and finishes that consumers could coordinate with their outfit or mood. For the first time, Stanley wasn’t just useful — it became a trending status symbol. Paired with Stanley’s incredible durability and effectiveness, the Quencher is one trend that’s likely to stand the test of time.

Why Is the Stanley Quencher Cup So Popular?

What makes the story of the Stanley Quencher cup so unique is the way the brand was guided by consumers to tap into their desire for a sustainable, stylish, and practical travel cup option. This alignment with customer values didn’t happen by accident. It was the result of Stanley’s willingness to listen to its users and make updates to its product based on direct feedback. Here are some lessons growing businesses can take away from Stanley Cup marketing.

1. Listen to Your Customers
The first step in creating a product that resonates with your market is understanding where the true value lies for your customers. This goes beyond surface-level desires or the initial feedback loop and involves deep dives into customer behavior, preferences, and unmet needs. Stanley’s success with the Quencher was largely due to their ability to discern not just what customers said they wanted but to understand the underlying needs and preferences that drove those statements.

2. Test and Learn
Adopting a lean startup approach, characterized by the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) concept, is crucial. This method emphasizes the importance of rapid prototyping, testing, and iterating based on real user feedback. It’s about being agile enough to pivot when certain aspects of the product don’t meet customer expectations and doubling down on the features that do. For Stanley, this meant continuously refining the Quencher’s design, usability, and marketing approach to better align with consumer demands.

3. Devote Resources Wisely
When you hit on a product or service that gains traction, it’s essential to devote significant resources to scaling it. This doesn’t just mean financial investment but also dedicating time, talent, and technology to ensure that the product can grow without losing the quality or essence that made it popular. Recognizing the Quencher’s potential meant ramping up production, enhancing Stanley Cup marketing efforts, and ensuring supply chains were robust enough to meet the surging demand.

What Is the Stanley Cup Marketing Strategy Today?

Today, the Quencher story is more than just a tale of a product becoming a hit; it’s a blueprint for Stanley’s growth in the modern business landscape. By listening to customers, embracing a test-and-learn philosophy, and strategically allocating resources, companies can navigate the complexities of market demands and consumer preferences. As the Founder & CEO of a marketing agency, I see these principles as fundamental to guiding businesses through pivots and scaling efforts. The Quencher’s journey underscores the importance of agility, customer-centricity, and strategic investment in innovation.

A critical component of being able to pivot as quickly and effectively as Stanley has is the agility and open-mindedness of the members of the C-Suite. Stanley’s President through this successful blitz was recruited from Crocs, where he was the CMO, so had a marketing mind. While not all companies need a full-time CMO at the helm, it’s crucial to have one to turn to for marketing leadership and strategy.

A fractional CMO can help you choose the best strategies to grow your business. Download our overview to learn more about our fCMO services, our deep bench of specialized CMOs, and our unique matching process!

Contact Us
About &Marketing:

&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.

About the Author

As the Founder & CEO of &Marketing (www.and-marketing.com), Raj and his team strive to provide growing businesses unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj has more than two decades of experience in B2B and B2C marketing, sales, & strategy. He has led nearly 100 high-profile marketing strategy projects for Global 100, mid-sized clients, and SMBs, plus over a decade with General Electric and General Mills. He is a sought-after advisor and facilitator, with experience across five continents. He is known for bringing the best of ‘big company’ marketing and strategy to smaller companies without the baggage, his bias for practical implementation, and his unrelenting customer focus.